It's been a while now since I've been working on refreshing the looks of the "PTCBox.Me" sites.
Since it is a large scale project, I've worked on its parts separately to keep on progressing in a stable kind of way.
First up the new colors were decided.. a fresher blue-cyan that would not deviate much from our original colors.
Then the new logos were designed to match more of a "Box" like look paired with an even more cutting-edge looking font that could signature them perfectly.
Updating the forum's look was the first task to get completed with the new colors, logos and a small restructuring of its layout to a more responsive design for smaller resolutions.
I then begun working on the main site's look in a way that could host my new ideas that are yet to be implemented.
However I hit a few walls with my host that took a long time to break through, so instead I focused on the PTCBox.Me Ads page restructuring. So what we have now is a faster loading, lighter looking ads page, with much better responsiveness, less clutter and a layout that lets the viewer focus on the most important aspects of it and that means the advertisers' banners and text ads.
The most important part of the refreshed look is the removal of the Middle and Bottom banner spots, to improve the quality of the top ones by removing the overflow feeling that 16 banners gave before. Also now as the resolution of the viewer's screen gets smaller there is better content responsiveness, with the 2 columns of banners become 1 while maintaining their importance hierarchy (SpotR1 gets below SpotL1 but above SpotL2 so its value is not reduced).
The site announcements have been moved to the right sidebar as well as the payment options and a few other non-essential tools that will be added later, so that the whole sidebar gets the ability to become completely hidden in smaller resolutions and allow the user to only display them in case he desires to.
Updates have also been performed to the traffic stats table to make it more responsive to lower resolutions but also to the navigation buttons below the main banner area that were also redesigned.
The featured links are now located in the left sidebar along with the AdHitz square space on top which has always been attracting a lot of clicking activity from the visitors. This way the left sidebar and the main part of the page that holds the classic 468x60 banners will always be visible at any resolution that with a width of 560 pixels and above. Even lower resolution responsiveness would be possible if that 468x60 AdHitz space allowed us to resize it but based on their terms that's not an option, so we'll have to live with that.
Coming up next is the ad submission page that also needs rewriting and a few fixes and improvements in the Ad Manager to make it a more pleasant experience for the advertiser.
Then I'll finally deal with the home page.
Let me know what you think of the new looks and stay tuned for updates!