Young Writers Society

The new YWS has been in the works since October 2008, and it's gone through many variations since then. So I thought I'd go over its evolution a bit.


This is the initial mock-up that I did on Adobe Illustrator of the Fiction forums. While the fiction forums look nothing like that (I did try it, but it just didn't work well), the home page has a similar layout. You have the 'Recently Updated' works and the user box. Also, while this shows the advertising above the user box, it's now below the user box. That's because of user feedback (I think Teague specifically).



This is how it looked once I started laying it out on the web. While it looks nothing like what we have now, notice the two columns format.



This is very recognizably the home page. You'll notice the header is pretty much like the old YWS (just with links below rather than above), but other than that, it's pretty much the same as what we have now. The sidebar is white instead of gray, though, and it's also a little wider than now. Initially, the ad was going to be wider than it is now, but people thought that made the page looked scrunched together so I changed it.

Also, recent posts are displayed in two columns just like recent literary items. When I did this, it looked too cramped, so now recent posts is just in one column.



This has mostly everything filled in, and I thought I was mostly done at this point. Just needed to add in Staff Picks and Featured Member, and I was done!



You'll notice two things are different: staff picks is now shown, and the header. Once Bobo started helping me out, he wanted to make a ton of changes. One of those changes is the header. At first, I didn't like it. But, it grew on me and now I prefer it. Of course, many people objected to the color of the links at the bottom of the header. For some reason, people don't like beige against blue.



Then one day, I decided I didn't like how YWS looked. It was organized, but it wasn't eye-candy. So I went looking, and found a phpBB3 theme called 1thank, which is what you see above. It looked nice, and I thought of going with it for a while. However, there were some issues with it.

For one, the background is black. If you notice, the colors on most major Web sites are blue and white; there's a reason for this. Blue and white make a Web site seem opening, while black make a Web site look dreary. Of course, others do disagree, but they make up a minority.

Also, a lot of people didn't like the swirly images in the footer. I thought they were kind of neat, but they were taking up valuable space.



And now you have YWS as it is now!



So there you have it: the evolution of new YWS. It's changed a ton over time; each time getting a little better.

I find this facinating.

I'm going to have to do page layout in college, so seeing how it works in practical applications I find really cool.

Good work Nate. ^^

Haha, eye candy.

It's great, thank you.


Demeter
x

It's beautiful. It really is. I love all the changes it went through, but I did like the initial black one. And I'm in one of those screenshots