Feel free to challenge or ignore as you see fit... it is a Sunday morning and i feel in the mood to muse...
I find myself with a fresh cup of tea and a few minutes to kill and thought i'd note my musings on website look and feel... my understanding from having some non-expert involvement in the process professionally, and running a few sites from a hobby perspective. I don't claim to be an expert and i am not attacking or defending the choices made here. But i do think there is a lot more to consider than many realise.
There is a lot of very serious research into how the human eyes and brain perceive and process text. Much of this goes back to the days of printed media, some of it is more contemporary and specialises in the interaction with a computer screen.
There is a reason why newspapers and most other professional printed media use columns - because it is recognised that scanning long lines of text is far more tiring and problematic to the human eye/brain than shorter lines. Add to that the fact that a LOT of modern display devices have a much larger aspect ratio (widescreen 16:9 rather than traditional 4:3... also phones in landscape mode) and are in general much larger (22 inch widescreen is now common compared to a 17" 4:3 screen a few years ago) which means IF the whole screen was used for text the line length would make it harder to scan and pick up the following line, and be much more tiring.
Try this simple test. Take a page of solid text in something like word and print it out twice. Once portrait onto A4 with 2.5cm borders and extra line spaces between paragraphs. Second Landscape onto A4 with no borders and no spacing. It very clearly becomes evident that the spacing, line length and general layout of the text has a significant bearing on its readability - especially over long periods of time.
EDIT : You'll notice for example that this post appears as a 'wall of text' with no breaks. This is because the forum software is stripping out out line spaces I am putting between paragraphs (a simple technique for breaking up large amounts of text into readable sections). I don't think it did this a day or two ago and it might be a response from the owner to the cries of 'too much wasted space'? Personally i find it less readable.END EDIT.
It has also been shown that the human eye finds it easier and more restful to read without significant other distractions (text and pictures) surrounding it. Hence a lot of modern print and website design that ensures there is a clear border around a specific set of text, often with a different soft contrasting background colour. Its a technique that has been demonstrated to unobtrusively demarcate separate subjects (or in our case posts), though the choice of colours used can be critical. Too much contrast is jarring and can be tiring.
The design and use of fonts is a long standing area of research too. The rule of thumb is that fonts with serifs (Times New Roman) were developed to be easier on the eye to read in large blocks of text. And fonts without serifs (helvetica, arial, verdana - which the forum text is similar to) were designed to be more eye catching and easier to read in smaller blocks of text. Again there are also aesthetic choices here, serif fonts are often seen to impart more authority and non serif fonts are considered more friendly and accessible. Interestingly one of the main reasons that early versions of windows and apple products used Helvetica and arial so much was because low resolution screens dont handle the detail required for a serif font anywhere near as crisply as a non serif font. Likewise there's a reason newspapers stick with serif fonts - because they have large blocks of text that need to be scanned easily and they want to be seen as authoritative. (Given the length of this post i'm thinking I would like a font change option, but i don't see this musing as 'authoritative' either!)
The issue of font colour is interesting too. On a modern high definition screen black text on a white background has been shown to be more stressful and tiring on the eyes than a less harsh grey on white. However older, lower resolution monitors struggle to show grey and white as crisply as black on white. Modern flat screens are also capable of much higher brightness and contrast than old Cathode Ray Tubes. And modern small format screens on new phones are brighter and sharper again. So a grey on white on a modern screen with optimal brightness looks a lot different to grey on white on an older, lower resolution less bright CRT. The adoption of grey text by many sites is an attempt to satisfy both requirements. Naturally there are a lot more than fifty shades of grey and some work in some circumstances and not in others.
Naturally there is also a large amount of personal preference, quality of eyesight and familiarity mixed into this and as with anything to do with the human brain there is no "one size fits all". but there are some very sound reasons behind why modern websites have some common elements to their look and feel.
The challenge for modern websites is the vast range of devices they need to serve, multiple browsers, dozens of versions of those browsers, thousands of screen sizes, aspect ratios and resolutions of screens not to mention the local adjustment of things like contrast and brightness, adblockersand other add-ons. Modern web coding using language extensions like "bootstrap" give a lot of flexibility to try and maintain a common look and feel for a site across all those variables. They aren't perfect, but they are a damned sight better than a "fixed" page layout - take it or leave it approach.
As to this website; its based on off the shelf forum software, where the heavy lifting and base code is provided as a package with a large amount of options for implementation. Some of those options will include colour and layout choices, but some of the structure and general style will be fixed. I do not know the details in this instance, but have worked with other similar packages in the past. I have zero knowledge of how much of the forum design is 'straight out of the box' or how much has been tweaked. I'd guess that the owners efforts have been focused on porting all of the existing material, memberships and such like into the new software without losing anything and ensuring that functionally it all works.
I am not for one moment suggesting that everything is perfect in the changes to this forum, nor am i attempting to attack or defend them. I'm simply musing that there are solid reasons behind most if not all of the design decisions.
Clearly the change has been more successful for some than others. A lot of that will depend on a user's personal situation, preference and familiarity. I am sure that there will be some things that will change and evolve based on feedback.
Tea finished... time to go fix my router....
