In what I should obviously admit to myself will be a never-ending ongoing process, I'm going to spend a bit of time working on the site layout and design this week. I kind of like the way the site looks now, but I think I'm going to change it to a fixed width and, sometime down the road, do something a bit more sophisticated to allow people to size it as they wish.
In the meantime, here are some of the things I'd like to work on.
Adjust the site design and get the main pages moved over to that design.
Create and publish the new "Windows" and "Cloud Computing" activity centers, replacing the current Windows Vista and Xbox 360 activity centers.
Clean up the Reviews and Showcases pages so they're actually useful. There's too much content on this site and its getting hard to find things.
Move the blog over to the new design. If I had control over this, it would have happened months ago, but I don't, so I need to kneel before the Web team and beg. I will do so again this week.
Figure out something more elegant for screen shot galleries. This is a long-time problem, but every time I've tried to do something about it, people have complained that the new versions don't work for them.
Update "What I Use" ... I actually did this in the past month but something happened with the formatting so I had to delay publishing it.
Obviously, I'm curious what you think. If there are things you'd like to see changed, please let me know. Honest feedback is always appreciated, and that includes virtually anything related to the site, including the direction and focus of the coverage here, the way information is presented, whatever. I'm not interested in fanboy stupidity, however, so if you're going to use this post as an excuse to troll, please don't bother. Life is too short.
Thanks everyone. --Paul
UPDATE: I need to get back to work on the book (which I hope to finally finish this week), but here's what's new:
Home page
Sample article (though I will be expanding it and adding the correct images later)
Windows Activity Center (replaces Windows Vista Activity Center)
Cloud Computing Activity Center (replaces Xbox 360 Activity Center)
I also did some basic cleanup on the Reviews and Showcases pages, though I didn't change them to the new design yet. I pushed all the pre-release Windows Vista reviews and showcases to sub-pages (along with the XP/2000/Me/9x reviews and showcases) and pushed the Xbox 360 screenshots to their own sub-page.
I will work on the other top-level pages later in the weekend if possible.