is it official or has 1 of my cats changed my settings by sitting down on my keyboard...?



Mayo

Don't like the new format. Too much bright white space. Looks like a commercial site rather than a warm homey site like it was before. Really sad! I miss the old layout.

I don't care for it much either..
Too bright and too narrow!

Its horrible, I have to scroll down to find forums, they took the banners away, and ive got a little triangle of a box of text, next to moving ads.

well maybe that little flower next to the giant name is the banner now.

it's official...

The thread "September 2016 website redesign is complete!" in Site Talk forum

oh my...
Mayo

Don't like it at all!

Ok, I am older and change seem to effect me more, but I have been though changes before and I know it takes me time to adjust. I do feel a lot of the changes will be good, I just have not found my way around yet. I am afraid we are going to be faced with the problem they were never able to correct (for me and my eyesight) when they did the renew over at Dave' Garden. They created all this blank space and narrowed the useable space down, and I could never adjust to it. Having the same problems now.

Makes me feel like a damn fool. I dont know how to change all this stuff. You go to customize home page, and there are all these boxes with nothing in them but the word row and column. Made me a wreck. I woke up feeling pretty good about the day and myself, but I guess Im just clueless. I dont know what older is, but I just turned 60, dont feel all that old, and I dont have a clue about this stuff. I dont know what they changed that is so great. On the other hand, I dont use any of the journal stuff or datbase. I just look at pictures and chat.

Change is hard. Felt the other form was easier to use. But will get used to it.

Seedfork said:Ok, I am older and change seem to effect me more, but I have been though changes before and I know it takes me time to adjust. I do feel a lot of the changes will be good, I just have not found my way around yet. I am afraid we are going to be faced with the problem they were never able to correct (for me and my eyesight) when they did the renew over at Dave' Garden. They created all this blank space and narrowed the useable space down, and I could never adjust to it. Having the same problems now.

Larry,

do you use a pc or a smartphone?/

If you're using a pc you can just enlarge the whole thing by pressing the CTRL and the + at the same time.


Mayo

gardenglory said:Makes me feel like a damn fool. I dont know how to change all this stuff. You go to customize home page, and there are all these boxes with nothing in them but the word row and column. Made me a wreck. I woke up feeling pretty good about the day and myself, but I guess Im just clueless. I dont know what older is, but I just turned 60, dont feel all that old, and I dont have a clue about this stuff. I dont know what they changed that is so great. On the other hand, I dont use any of the journal stuff or datbase. I just look at pictures and chat.

hi Pam,

it took me a while to understand it too..

The Customize your Homepage is about changing the page you see when you click the little house in the left top of the page.
I never used that before, my NGA link in Firefox sent me immediately to the Daylily Forum page..
Now that I studied it a bit it is kinda neat though

What I did is this:
go to the Customize your Homepage page

empty your 'drawing board' by clicking this link:


All the options you have to ádd to your Homepage are now on the left


Now you have to decide how many columns you want on your page
Remember: rows are horizontal (like lines in a book) and columns are vertical


I myself don't need too much on my Homepage, just the Inspirational Stuff, the Forums that I watch and the photo's that are recently added to the database
So I choose 1 row with 2 columns. After I have clicked 'Add it', it looks like this:


Now I can drag the items that I want in my columns from the left to the box where i want them:


and ta-daa! This is what I see when I click on the little house at the top left:


Mayo

I use a PC most of the time, a tablet pretty often, and very seldom my wife's smart phone. I guess it says a lot that I still much prefer a flip phone (just because it works better as a phone), it is so much tougher and great for my pocket when working in the garden.
The problem for me with the new format is the reduced width of the text boxes. I normally keep my zoom in Chrome set at ninety and at that the width of the text boxes are cut off on the right side, so you then have to scroll.

Seedfork said: I normally keep my zoom in Chrome set at ninety and at that the width of the text boxes are cut off on the right side, so you then have to scroll.

Hmm, I don't use Chrome and have no idea how that works
but when you use the Ctrl and + the letters get bigger and when a word doesn't fit in the frame anymore it just gets moved to the next line.
No scrolling needed (exept down)

before:


after:



Mayo

It is basically the same thing, I can also use the control pulse or minus, but the result is the same. Once I get to 90 the text boxes have to be scrolled when in the plant list, probably a lot of other areas also. Plus my eyes (mind) just doesn't appreciate all the blank area too the right. Like looking at the garden and seeing a lot of empty space, I just feel the need to put something there!

The white background everywhere is extremely hard on the eyes, enough so I have to keep looking away or they tear up.
Thank you Mayo for your clear explanations! The enlarge text demo is an eye saver

I also do not like the new form or color. The old format was much easier to navigate.

To me it was cleaner and simpler, I guess it's a matter of getting used to this new pages. But too much empty space floating around.

I don't need all that stuff in my homepage too, so I did just what Mayo did!

Painful. It is probably all good. But it took a lot of learning to get this far. Then you have to do it again. I get the feeling NGA is aiming for a new type of audience. This is most likely the young.

It's not so much as aiming for a new audience, but moving forward with the times. As the web continues to evolve, it's important for websites to evolve with it. I don't want Garden.org to eventually become antiquated and stale.

I made a tremendous amount of changes today based on the member feedback and I feel like we've made a lot of progress. Unlike other websites the webmaster here is responsive and quick to fix issues that come up.

I predict in a couple weeks you will love this new design so much, you won't even remember the old one.