New Site Design
June, 2014
The Design
esl-lounge has undergone several huge changes since its launch in 2001. In June 2014, we released a totally new design and logo to go alongside.
Mobile users (smartphones, iPads, tablets, etc) now make up between a third and half of all internet users and this provides an enormous technical challenge for website owners like myself.
You can use mobile style sheets to make fonts more readable on mobile devices but it's a halfway solution. What you really want is a site that changes its overall structure and architecture depending on the device or computer being used to access it - and this is where "responsive design" comes in.
Responsive Design is what a website does when it finds itself in the Star Wars garbage compactor, when the sides of the browser window begin to move in and compact a site, usually forcing it to collapse horribly into an oblivion of overlapping boxes, overly-wide images and horizontal scroll bars.
The main teacher site has now been developed with a responsive design, which means it should render pretty well in all devices, anything from a small smartphone screen, through tablets right up to modern 30" monitors. There'll still be a few bugs and niggles, which will get ironed out over the course of 2014. This new design will also be rolled out to the student site and eventually the Premium site too.
If you want to see the responsive design in action and you're on a mobile device, you can change its orientation from portrait to landscape (or vice versa) and you'll see a few changes. If you're on a computer, try dragging the right side of your browser window to the left and see what happens.
If you have any comment about our new design, see something that doesn't look right or have any questions, be sure to contact us.
The Logo
We also had a new logo designed for us at the same time, a refreshing change from the homemade logo that had been a "placeholder" for a decade! We love what the speech bubbles represent: communication, dialogue, togetherness and co-operation; great qualities for an ESL teaching & learning site to strive for.
