Latest updates:

 

• "Today in Coldplay history..." widget added to sidebar. Neat.
  
• Horizontal banner changed to vertical position, to minimise unused space.
  
• Featured Articles box appearing order fixed.
  

Plenty other stuff going on in the background such as removal of unused tags, improving menus, adding news categories and gallery integration from vBulletin.

^Oouuuh I really like that "Today in Coldplay history" thing, very cool :nod:

Trying out a new Google custom search on the main site (top right). Anyone care to try it out? :)

sure :) i'll be back soon with feedback

well after doing a few searches i think that the new google search thing will really help me find what i am looking for much easier and faster, thank you :)

Trying out a new Google custom search on the main site (top right). Anyone care to try it out? :)

 

wohooo yeah! just realized there is a new design of the coldplaying website! :wacko:

 

just tried out the search function - looks like one can find things more easy with it. only tried it out twice yet though ;)

Update: Google search remains at the top, an article archive search added beneath the Latest News (this one highlights your chosen search terms within the results). That should have all bases covered for now.

I'm not gonna say that it's immensely horrible but I don't really like it.

There are a few reasons that I don't like it (especially as a designer my self).

 

To start with: It's a mess! Nothing connects together. It looks like it are all different parts from different designs put together without any tweaking.

- The website is not following the current standards! It brings the user years back and it doesn't improve much on the old layout except that it's different.

- The content boxes are out of it's order.

I mean: Big boxes | Tight boxes and middle sized boxes which makes things confusing.

- It's not really grid based, by following the overall grid it could become much cleaner!

- There is a lack of whitespace which could clean up a lot.

- It's old! Now you might think.. old? It's actually new! It's not using HTML5 and CSS3 which is becoming the new standard soon, not that this is that big of a problem but I'd advise to follow these standards.

- Contrast (color & content) Things don't seem to work well together, especialy the dark colors in the footer.

And most of all, it's not really having the 'Coldplay' vibe!

 

Improvements.

What could be a huge improvement, is planning the content in a clean way.

What has the biggest priority for the visitor to see when he/she enters the website?

By combining things it will be possible to clean things up, and it will make things available for the visitor only when he/she wants to see it.

By creating more whitespace, things will be cleaner and less 'bright to the eye'.

 

I could add plenty more things but that would be way to much text but I'm just trying to be a help so it would be an amazing site for an amazing community ready for the future! :)