Now Smell This has had a long-overdue redesign. I feel I should apologize for leaving it so ugly for as long as I did, although of course I will think it looks ugly again in about a month, and some of you may not care for the way it looks even now.
General improvements: the site is now reasonably mobile responsive — it should function much, much better on mobile devices. And there are now buttons at the bottom of individual articles to share content on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
Otherwise, everything works pretty much the same as it always did, but things have moved around a bit. The login is now at the top left of your screen instead of on the right sidebar, and the link now takes you to another screen. I hope to get a pop-up login box working soon.
The search function is not working at the moment — I'll get it fixed as soon as I can. Search is working now!
A minor change: gravatars — the little pictures that appear next to your name when you comment — are now round instead of square, IF you're using a modern browser (see below). I think the majority of custom and identicon gravatars1 look much nicer this way, but a small percentage of users with custom gravatars will find that their image doesn't look as nice with the corners cut off. If anyone cares to complain — just comment below! and that way you'll also see what your gravatar looks like — I'm happy to take a vote on the issue in a future poll.
Do let me know if you experience any trouble, or if you find a page that doesn't look right, unless you're using Internet Explorer 7 or below, in which case, you have my apologies but I cannot help.2
Questions, comments, complaints?
1. You can sign up for a custom gravatar here, and you can also create a public profile for your gravatar so that you can share contact information with other readers. Be sure to use the same email address that you use for your account here! If you do create a public profile, come back to Now Smell This when you're done and add the URL to your profile (log in, and then click on your name above the logo at the top of the site — that will take you to the page where you can add the URL). Do not be alarmed if you create a new gravatar and it doesn't show up right away, that's just a function of browser caching. It will appear eventually, or you can try clearing your browser cache.
If you don’t have a custom gravatar, an “identicon” gravatar (a geometric image associated with your account) is generated for you when you leave a comment.
2. Unfortunately, I do not have the time, patience or coding skills to keep the site functioning in legacy browsers: if you're still using Internet Explorer 7 or below, the site will look a mess. Luckily, very few people are still using IE7 and IE6 (do note that even Twitter has given up on IE6 & 7). Now Smell This works reasonably well in IE8 (although a few items will render differently than they will in other, newer, better browsers), and fine in IE9 and IE10. As always, the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome work like a charm.
Gorgeous, Dahling!
Thanks!
I love it!
Ha, good because it is going to look this way for awhile
I love the new look!
Good!
This “remodeling” feels quite natural and looks very nice and clean. Let’s hope everything works the way intended or gets resolved fast.
Thanks! (and knock on wood)
I love the new look, very clean and easy to navigate whether on mobile or laptop. Bravo!
Really glad you like it!
Love it!
Let’s see how you look, gravatar…
Great! Love the layout of the comments!
They’re much easier to read…and your gravatar looks great!
What pleasant surprise!! I like it!! Easy to read on mobile!!!
Sorry it took so long!
I’m rather old-fashioned and am not using twitter & co, but even your good old website looks new and fresh, congratulations!
Good, thanks!
A nice payoff for all your effort, Robin — the site looks great!
But time for a new gravatar for me, I think!
Oh, gravatar looks great!!
I think the new gravatars look great!
Oh good!
Congratulations – love it. NST is one of my favorite sites .
Thanks! And love your gravatar in round.
Love the new look Robyn, seems more modern and clean. Congratulations!
So glad you like it!
R: OK…now you need to take a three-day vacation…you deserve it!
Ha, I really do…why only 3 days?
And it looks like I need a new gravatar.
You’re crazy, it looks better this way.
I really love it! Much ‘cleaner’. Less is more, innit?
Sometimes!!
No worries about the “ugliness” of the old site – I come here for the juice, not the bottle.
The new site does look nice though.
Oh, good, because it will never be as gorgeous as the contents
Looks great, thanks for all your hard work!
Thanks for reading!
I love the new look, Robin! My top 3 favorite changes are: the font (both the type and the size), the rounded corners and the time stamp (maybe it was there before but I only noticed now that both date and time are there). Great job on the facelift!
Good!
Time stamp is new — I had removed it from the site before & now I can’t remember why, it is convenient.
This looks great on my iPhone. We’ll done!
So glad, thanks!
I preferred the old design because of the colours and the centered text.
Oh, then sorry!
I didn’t mind the old design but I can actually read this one without my spectacles!
Thanks for all the hard work!
Bigger fonts are apparently better for lots of us
Clean, readable and not overdesigned. Smooth delivery on iPad which is how I read everything. You are Throughly Modern Millie!
Ha, but several years late…
I thought i was at the wrong site at first. Looks good though.
Glad you like it.
Love the larger font and the cleaner look overall. Well done, Robin!!
Good, thanks!
I LOVE the old website, but there are a lot of nice things about the new one. I can’t imagine how much work goes into a website, and even more into organizing and updating it, researching and writing posts, and other things no doubt I’m not even aware of. This is the perfume website that I read every day, and you have my undying gratitude, Robin!
I guess the gravatars are the one thing I greatly miss about the change. Gravatars have so little real estate to begin with, and the circle makes them even smaller. Also, they now seem to be lower resolution, so harder to see than before, enlarged or not. I really enjoy the creativity and spirit of people’s gravatars, so I’d hugely appreciate having the square gravatars with more pixels back.
It also appears to me (on a MacBook Pro) that the pictures that open each post are now smaller in relation to the text. Since you always find THE BEST pictures, I’m missing the larger pictures, too.
If course, although I don’t use other media at this point, I realize it’s an ever increasing challenge to ensure that a website displays well on so many different screen sizes and shapes.
Thanks again for this extraordinary blog!
Curious, how big is your screen size? And what browser are you using?
The (default) gravatars are actually slightly larger than they were, and the image sizes are exactly the same…99% of our images are exactly 200 px in height. The image resolution has not changed at all.
What has changed is that the website is wider than it was, and the fonts are much bigger, but, it will also now adjust to the width of your screen and things will get smaller if you have less screen available. It is also true that it depends on how your browser renders in terms of default screen resolution…so on my desktop, for instance, which has a large screen (19″) but a relatively small screen resolution, everything that I’ve made bigger via design (font size & gravatars) now looks bigger. The site looks a gajillion times better on my desktop.
On my laptop, which has a smaller screen but a larger screen resolution, everything looks bigger in Firefox, but smaller in Chrome, and that is true of nearly all sites I look at in Chrome, and can be easily adjusted w/ Chrome’s zoom feature, which I therefore tend to keep at 125% instead of the default 100%. (quoting, in case it helps: “A high resolution screen means that there are more pixels on the screen. As there are more pixels on the screen, the pixels are smaller. The pixels being smaller means that the text and all other elements on the screen are also smaller.”)
So…you could try messing w/ screen resolution and/or zoom. In many browsers, zoom is a simple keyboard function, but don’t know what that might be for what you’re using, probably Safari?
And all of this is the problem with designing a website — everyone sees something different than what you intended, and there’s absolutely nothing to be done about it unless you forced everyone to use the same browser & the same screen size.
My laptop is 15 in and I’m using Safari. The photos are smaller relative to the column width and that’s the same whether I zoom or not. When I zoom, the gravatars get larger but look blurrier. Maybe I need to clear the cache for the new site to work properly. Someday when I have more time I could try other browsers…after I clean out those closets….
I don’t think I’ll ever be a fan of round gravatars, in any case.
I should try looking at it in the office, just to see what it looks like on Internet Explorer.
Most commenters seem to find it easier to read now – sort of a miracle given all the formats.
I find the gravatars easier to see on my desktop, not on my Kindle (because my kindle resolution is terrible), but also better on a (borrowed!) ipad, and even on the ipad mini — I tested it at the Apple store. It looks good on my husband’s 11″ MacBook Air, but not as good as it does on my desktop.
On my Android phone, the site looks great using Dolphin, but not quite as great using the Opera browser.
So yes, it’s a huge challenge. Most important for me at the moment is to make sure the site will fit in the screen — the number of people using mobile devices to browse the web is just huge, and we’re very behind.
But really, am happy to visit the gravatar issue in a poll! I’m adding it to my to do list.
Now this is weird: I looked at NST in the office on Microsoft Internet Explorer, and the gravatars were square! They also seem larger and clearer than on Safari; not sure whether they really were or if they just seemed that way with the missing corners restored.
Sorry, somehow I missed this comment! That is probably because you have IE8 at the office. If you had IE7, nothing would work properly. If you had IE9 or IE10, they’d be round.
Had time to kill at an Apple store yesterday so I looked up NST on the iPad Mini and iPod Touch. It fit very nicely and was very readable on both.
The resolution of the gravatars was better – if I expanded the view, they got more detail, which isn’t happening on MacBook Pro. Need to try clearing the cache…
Or, possibly, try using another browser on your MacBook…maybe Chrome? As I think I already said above, NST looks much “crisper” to me in Chrome than in Firefox, even on the same computer. But I’ve never used Chrome on an apple, so can’t say. It’s all a pain in the neck, I admit.
I have been reading this blog for couple of years now and I did not feel an urge to sign up and comment any of the articles here, but this I need to comment. Robin, sorry, but this design is really dull. Even the out of the box WordPress template looks better than this : / There are hundreds of amazing templates for six bucks each and there are even free ones – just download and install any of them. I am sorry to be this rude, but just take a look at osmoz.com. Please don’t hate me for telling this, but I design websites myself and this is just wrong : )
Thanks so much for chiming in, and glad something inspired you to de-lurk!