WinCustomize 2007 Launches!

Ooooh.... shiny...

Published on January 16, 2007 By Zoomba In WinCustomize News

After months of coding and testing, tweaking and rearranging, and many hours spent by our web developers toiling over line after line of code, feature request and last minute change, we are proud to officially launch the new WinCustomize.com! A lot of time and effort has gone into the design of the new site to make it easier for users, both new and old, to quickly find exactly what they want. We've also expanded the functionality of the site in ways that are aimed at rewarding long-time community members, and to make everyone's time here at the site more enjoyable.

The most drastic change most will notice is the completely new design and site layout. The new look, with its glassy blacks, grays and whites is a much needed refresh to the old blue and white design users have been living with for two years now. The new "skin" for the site looks a lot more modern and inviting. One of the goals of WinCustomize 2007 was to make the site itself skinnable. Our design guru, Dark-Star designed WinCustomize with this goal in mind, and in the coming months, we will be adding additional site skins for site subscribers to pick from.

On top of the visuals, a lot of time has gone into cleaning up a lot of the visual clutter from the old site. The front page is much less busy now, focusing in more on actual content. Where before there were scrolling lists down the side of the page, we have a much shorter sidebar. The top of the page is focused much more on community content with items like "Today's Favorites" the "Featured Skin" (which can be browsed to see the last three featured items), the latest poll, "Today's Hot Pages" and "Featured Articles.

Digging down further, we've tried to make it as easy as possible to browse through the galleries and subcategories under each major library. A common complaint regarding the old WinCustomize was that it was difficult to specifically browse through a sub-category like "Holiday" under WindowBlinds. Or that it was difficult to find a given article after it had fallen off the "Newest Articles" list. To help remedy that, we've built a breadcrumbs system that will allow users to see exactly where they are, as well as how to get back to where they've been.

Of course we will have a guide up in the near future explaining how to use the breadcrumb system, as well as some of the other new features of WinCustomize 2007 (such as the search bar being contextual based on what gallery you're browsing). But they're pretty easy to use. Just try clicking around on the arrows between the section names and you should be able to pick things up very quickly.

Now, we've done a lot to refresh the site from a technical perspective, but we also had a large focus on the community when working on this project. One of the major additions with WinCustomize 2007 is the ability for Master Level skinners in the community to sell their work directly through the WinCustomize store. This is a way for us to help out some of the skinners who have been around for a long time and contributed greatly to the community. Users who subscribe to WinCustomize.com will receive a discount when purchasing any Master Skins through our store.

For the rest of the community, we've opened up the WinCustomize Personal Pages to all users. A WC Personal Page is your own little corner of WinCustomize. You'll get your own WC subdomain (i.e. zoomba.wincustomize.com), a photo gallery to upload and store your digital photos, and a place to easily track both your own submissions (this replaces the MySkins.aspx page) and keep an eye on articles and skins from your favorite authors here at WinCustomize. (To activate your personal page area, go to the Settings link underneath the search box, and click on the "Personal Site" tab. Follow the instructions to create your site.)

There are a number of other new buttons, links and features tucked away for you to discover. In many ways we've tried to make it as easy as possible for members of the community to take an active role in the site by providing quick links to submit news items for the site, to write articles of interest, and to submit content to the galleries. So please, take your time, explore, get comfortable and give us lots of feedback!

And of course, be sure to thank the folks who toiled away, hour after hour, to bring you this great new site. Our crack team of .net coder monkeys did an amazing job taking this site from vague concepts to what you see before you right now.

T-Man, Dark-Star, jpkylegirl, dean183 and andrew_.

Also, thank you to all of you who helped us out by submitting bug report after bug report, broke the test site in new and interesting ways and helped us really hammer out the kinks before launch.

Comments (Page 8)

106

cycoced

on Jan 17, 2007

Upeters,

as far as the navigation arrows are concerned, clear your browser cache, and this should do the trick (I had the same problem, and now it works after this little trick), for the rest...

107

Robbie_Boy

on Jan 17, 2007

WOW WOW WOW looks great guys

108

Zoomba

on Jan 17, 2007

upeters... what browser are you running?

109

Dark-Star

on Jan 17, 2007

Have you guys *ever* checked for valid HTML?

Hey upeters, thanks for your well thought out kind words. We appreciate them. Yes, sadly in a perfect world, our site would be clean of non-W3C tags/compliancy issues. Yes, we are quite aware of how to check for this as well. However, in a perfect world all browsers (or at the very least the leading ones) would behave the exact same way when they are compliant with the W3C -- but they are not. Because of this, we are forced to find ways to make the most popular browser work the same way. As a result, WinCustomize is not W3C compliant - but the leading browsers do behave similar to each other. By the way, what is your "preferred" browser/version are you running?

110

Erk.

on Jan 17, 2007

Thanks guys ...working pretty well for me, in both FF and IE7.

Great job!

111

upeters

on Jan 17, 2007

Hello again. Yes, I got your sarcasm.

I understand your problem, because I face it myself pretty often. I belive it is a matter of how one prefers to develop web pages. Personally, I use Opera 8.5x for normal browsing. I use Opera since it was still paid software, way back to version 3. (I prefer the version 8 branch just because I have some personal issues with the interface of version 9.) The reason I use Opera is just *because* it works as expected. It doesn't do anything else than render the code as written. When I code a program to output a page, and it is displayed incorrectly in Opera, I can be sure that there is a coding error in the static or dynamic part of the web page. On the other hand, Explorer just fixes any errors in runtime, correcting quotes, nesting errors, missing tags, etc. It is useless for development purposes, and the fact that a page renders in IE doesn't tell anything about the quality of the code. Once I have the program written, I test the output against HTML Validator Pro, to fix the latest mistakes. Then I test the render in other browsers, to make only then some final browser-specific fixes in the scripting or CSS. This methodology has worked fine for me in the last years, but of course it is a matter of personal taste.

I found that when the code is standard compliant, the number of additional workarounds for specific browsers is often pretty small. When the original code is problematic, several fixes may be necessary to make poor code work in additional browsers. YMMV.

Even using Opera 9, once you click to insert a link or an image on the top of this editor, you can't get back to the editor. So even if "it just works" in Explorer (and Firebird), there is something wrong in the code, as layers work perfectly in Opera. The navigation I mentioned before seems to work now.

I think you should see into the coding errors on this page. It *is* possible to write cross-browser compatible code which doesn't result in error messages in the status line. Have faith.

112

Digital3000

on Jan 17, 2007

The only error i've noticed is on the member pages, it shows my real name when I wanted my "web" name to show online. I checked to make sure there wasn't a checkmark in the show my real name settings as well.

Other then that everything works and looks great!

113

foreverserenity

on Jan 17, 2007

I'm not on WC, hardly ever, but WOW, impressive at first glance and looks pretty easy to use! Layout much better too! Makes me want to come back and look around some more!

114

BigALTho

on Jan 17, 2007

Only thing I see is just add back the count of skins of each program on the right as like the old site that was on the left, thats all. I think this will do a world of good so someone like me can keep track of the amount of skins or new updated ones. I know there is a spot on the main page but to me it is easier to track by numbers than showing them. Other than that it is a big improvement from old keep up improving.

115

Frogboy

on Jan 17, 2007

understand your problem, because I face it myself pretty often. I belive it is a matter of how one prefers to develop web pages. Personally, I use Opera 8.5x for normal browsing. I use Opera since it was still paid software, way back to version 3. (I prefer the version 8 branch just because I have some personal issues with the interface of version 9.) The reason I use Opera is just *because* it works as expected. It doesn't do anything else than render the code as written. When I code a program to output a page, and it is displayed incorrectly in Opera, I can be sure that there is a coding error in the static or dynamic part of the web page. On the other hand, Explorer just fixes any errors in runtime, correcting quotes, nesting errors, missing tags, etc. It is useless for development purposes, and the fact that a page renders in IE doesn't tell anything about the quality of the code. Once I have the program written, I test the output against HTML Validator Pro, to fix the latest mistakes. Then I test the render in other browsers, to make only then some final browser-specific fixes in the scripting or CSS. This methodology has worked fine for me in the last years, but of course it is a matter of personal taste.

I found that when the code is standard compliant, the number of additional workarounds for specific browsers is often pretty small. When the original code is problematic, several fixes may be necessary to make poor code work in additional browsers. YMMV.

Even using Opera 9, once you click to insert a link or an image on the top of this editor, you can't get back to the editor. So even if "it just works" in Explorer (and Firebird), there is something wrong in the code, as layers work perfectly in Opera. The navigation I mentioned before seems to work now.

I think you should see into the coding errors on this page. It *is* possible to write cross-browser compatible code which doesn't result in error messages in the status line. Have faith.

We prefer to focus resources on coding for the 99% and not for the 1%. While working on Opera perfectly is something we want to do. It's not a priority.

I know your frustration. I used to use OS/2 for years and it took me years to realize that if I go with a platform with little support, I'll get little support.

OS/2 users also tended to be their own worst enemies because they'd write snide, condescending remarks to developers or web designers about how their program or site wasn't compliant with some standard. This in turn made developers and web designers even lest apt to support them.

Similarly, the bottom line is that the site runs fine on Firefox and IE and that's basically the market. No error messages. No flakeyness. If I might be so bold, the best way to encourage the development team to support your browser is to provide helpful data rather than scorn. Because in reality, the team coudl just say "Site doesn't support Opera" and call it a day. The loss in traffic wouldn't even show up as a round-off error.

116

peterzeke1

on Jan 17, 2007

Yeah, it looks nice n all. Good effort.

What I'm wondering, though, is if the hours spent on redesigning the website could have been spent on creating up-to-date versions of tutorials for the products promoted on Wincustomize/Stardock. I recall someone from the Wincustomize or Stardock staff writing an article a few weeks ago about how they've failed to effectively support their products in terms of current documentation, tutorials, and examples.

The Wincustomize website looked good to me before the recent change. So, rather than put a new wrapper on a good thing already, why not put efforts towards those items begging for attention and renewal. There should be a complete section of tutorials for every item in the Object Desktop suite as well as examples the feature the latest features of the products.

Again, I like the new website of Wincustomize. I'm surprised, however, that the website was a priority over other necessary problematic items with the products actually promoted within the skinning community.

117

andrew_

on Jan 17, 2007

The old site was flawed, unreliable. The website development team doesnt have a hand in Tutorials or Documentation. For those two reasons alone I find holes in your argument. As a user I could see how the two could be easily combined and seen as one entity, afterall, theyre both on the web for all to see.

While you may see simply updating the content as a 'good enough' or even more worthwhile endevor, that would essentially equate to 'Putting perfume on a Pig' as my grandfather used to say. What good is better content, if you can't always get to it, find it or download it?

From a performance, quality, reliability and maintenance perspective the new website was well worth the effort. Minus the few smaller items that were left out of the initial upgrade, the site is wholly superior to it's predecessor.

118

windoe

on Jan 17, 2007

Fresh look, but I have to take time to get used to...

Only 2 questions :

In "My skins" how can you see the newest comments as before ? I dont see the small mail icon that warned

on old site.

I updated a rainy today and it doenst appear in "awaiting moderation" like before. Is it impossible to see awaiting files, now ?

Thanks in advance and congrats for good work.

119

Particle Man

on Jan 17, 2007

It looks pretty, but I miss having the gallery sidebar in a convenient place near the top of the page. On the old page, it was pretty easy to start opening tabs to the Windowblinds page, the IconPackager page, etc. as soon as you arrived so that you could see what was new. Any chance that the gallery links sidebar might be moved up?

Aside from that preference, no complaints, and kudos to a job well-done.

120

Frogboy

on Jan 17, 2007

Writing documentation and tutorials is a totally different effort from developing a website.

Moreover, to have a site that works for the community, you need one that is fast, reliable, and easier to expand. The old site worked fine if you were hard core. But to a new user, it was confusing.

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