Author Topic: Upgraded NASASpaceFlight.com New Site Launch (Read 18009 times)

Chris Bergin · « **on:** 12/20/2017 06:16 PM »

Now live! (May be a bit slow for the first 10-15 mins as the DNS catches up).

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/

Many thanks to Mark and his team for the work on this.

Old articles ported over. New articles will fully use the upgrades.
First new article is this one:

Upgrades include:
New image display - larger images, captions, options, etc.
Twitter/Youtube etc embedding into articles. Handy for where videos do a better job than an image (such as launch videos in launch articles).
Faster loading.
Mobile friendly (auto resizes).
Better navigation.
Better sectioning.
Cleaner multi-scrolling - keeping important things in view, rather than scrolling into large white/blank areas.
Updated logo (old one served us well, but needed a refresh).

We'll add more cowbell as we go, but content is everything, so this is all about access to content and the forum picks up the dirty work of discussion and additional resources.

Feedback welcome below. Screenshot how it looks to you, as we'd like to see how it looks on various devices and browsers.

Another upgrade to the servers will follow.
Forum upgrade will be 2018.

RocketLover0119 · « **Reply #1 on:** 12/20/2017 06:24 PM »

holy moly!! What a lookover! I LOVE it! i can tell chris and everyone else has worked hard to this day! CONGRATS!!!

Eagandale4114 · « **Reply #2 on:** 12/20/2017 06:44 PM »

Looking great on an iPhone X/Safari on iOS 11.2.1.

It’s buttery smooth and everything looks great on reader too.

Any chance of a dark mode? It would make it much easier on the eyes!

WylieC · « **Reply #3 on:** 12/20/2017 06:49 PM »

Beautiful! Congratulations, you guys have done an awesome job.

mtakala24 · « **Reply #4 on:** 12/20/2017 06:54 PM »

Its beautiful. Slightly darker background color could be used on the left/right unused areas on wide displays, but other than that, congratulations!

Flying Beaver · « **Reply #5 on:** 12/20/2017 06:55 PM »

Just some small issues with graphics and image resolution.

Edit: And now calling up www.nasaspaceflight.com doesnt go to the site but brings up a download for a GZip Archive.

Lar · « **Reply #6 on:** 12/20/2017 06:57 PM »

GREAT article and it really looks good in the new style. A possible bug is that when I tried to use the Post to FB button I got the below error (520)

Chris Bergin · « **Reply #7 on:** 12/20/2017 07:05 PM »

Mark's fixing that gz issue.

BradyKenniston · « **Reply #8 on:** 12/20/2017 07:08 PM »

Looking great on a 27" 5K iMac on Chrome!

Darkseraph · « **Reply #9 on:** 12/20/2017 07:11 PM »

Love it so far. It feels really modern and fresh.

Michael Baylor · « **Reply #10 on:** 12/20/2017 07:12 PM »

99% perfect. Huge improvement compared to the old site.

Here are some things that could be improved:
- ~~The logo on the new site is low resolution (the new logo is high resolution on the old site though).~~
- The hyperlinks in the articles aren't that useful. They search for tags rather than directing me to the exact article. In some cases the tags are not showing me the correct information. I have attached an image as an example. If I click the link about SpaceX's Mars plans, I expect to see info regarding that. Instead, I am sent to the Mars tag which shows me the latest article about Mars (which in this case is about the Mars InSight mission). It would have been much better if that link took me straight to the SpaceX BFR announcement article.
- The multiple pages are confusing. I didn't even notice the article was two pages when I first read it. I only saw the page 2 button when I was scanning over the site to see what I thought of the new look. Now I see that Chris tweeted a reminder that there were two pages. He shouldn't have to do this. The user should figure it out on their own without a problem. Not sure if this is going to be a normal thing or if it was because this particular article was long? My preferable fix would be to make it one long page. But, if you are worried about loading speeds, then make the next page button stand out a bit more.
- It would be nice if I could expand all the images in the article, not just the lead image.

Congrats to all involved! The criticism is very nit-picky because that's all I could find. Like I said, 99% perfect.

Edit: The multipage problem was made worse by the first page ending with a YouTube video. My eyes never looked under the video, because I thought that was it. If it was text maybe I would have seen it? Still, I think it should pop out more or be a single page.

Edit 2: The logo issue was fixed.

ulm_atms · « **Reply #11 on:** 12/20/2017 07:16 PM »

My $0.02

1. Too much white area...hard on eyes.

2. The "sections" could use some more boardering which would make each section's start/stop clearer and also help break up all that white space. Best example I can come up with quick is www.space.com It's a lot like this format but easier on the eyes with all the grey boardering for the "sections"

Other then that... GOOD JOB!!

Michael Baylor · « **Reply #12 on:** 12/20/2017 07:28 PM »

One more thing I just found. Captions are not showing on my phone. I tried tapping the images too, that didn't help.

TrueBlueWitt · « **Reply #13 on:** 12/20/2017 07:28 PM »

Like the new mobile design(chrome beta on Android), but taking forever to load right now.. not sure what's up with that?

Chris Bergin · « **Reply #14 on:** 12/20/2017 07:30 PM »

Quote from: TrueBlueWitt on 12/20/2017 07:28 PM

Like the new mobile design(chrome beta on Android), but taking forever to load right now.. not sure what's up with that?

Mark's on it. Not everyone, but there's a caching element being worked on by Mark.

Lars-J · « **Reply #15 on:** 12/20/2017 07:40 PM »

MUCH nicer, great job!

(although the first load took a long time - Chrome on Windows 10)

Coastal Ron · « **Reply #16 on:** 12/20/2017 07:46 PM »

Articles that are more than one page in length!

That can (and should) be put to use in the future.

I agree that there seems to be a lot of extra white space on my desktop browser version - it's probably OK for the mobile browser version (using Safari for both).

Nice upgrade.

kcrick · « **Reply #17 on:** 12/20/2017 07:47 PM »

The new site looks GREAT!
Oh, and it looked pretty good on my smartphone too!
And it did take me a few tries to bring it up on my laptop.

One thing I'm unsure on - what's the purpose of the 'Popular Posts' section?
Is this the top 5 articles in terms of forum posts?

I was scrolling looking for the top posts section and when I found this, I clicked on one of them and was redirected to an article. I scrolled further down and then found it - 'Active Discussions' section.

Kevin

FutureSpaceTourist · « **Reply #18 on:** 12/20/2017 07:48 PM »

Yes, looks fantastic on both my phone and iPad (image attached).

I can see an enormous amount of work has gone into it. Thank you; I think the results have definitely been worth it. Really fiting that the first new style article is a 12 year retrospective of SpaceX. Nice symmetry there with the 12 years of NSF. How far both have come in that time and both really coming into their own now!

One minor suggestion for a future enhancement: it would be great if there was an indication, under the article images at the top of the home page, of how many ‘pages’ of article images there are to click through.

catdlr · « **Reply #19 on:** 12/20/2017 07:48 PM »

What a great B-Day present. Looks wonderful. Thanks, Chris.