Look! New Homepage!

On my iMac (OSX 10.5.6, Firefox 3.0.5) the page does not display correctly. There's nothing at all in the right sidebar until below all the content of the main pane, and then all the right sidebar content is much wider than the sidebar itself.

Not of much consequence to me -- this is the first I've looked at the homepage in months. My bookmark is for the Last 24 Hours page, and I do all my navigation from there in new tabs.

Horrible. Absolutely horrible.

I have to scroll down _two_ pages to get to the list of recent posts. Also, the list itself is much less useful. On the old page I could check everything at one glance.

Also, the main page is misaligned - it's visibly skewed to the right. "The Rightful Place" logo looks like it's a giant ad banner.

In short, please, return the old page!

Well, I like the artistic concept for the appearance and layout, but it has several problems, although there is one bit I like much better.

• I, and many others, don't have scripts on by default, so having the list of blogs only accessible via a drop-down menu is annoying - I generally have a bunch of Sb webpages open at the same time, and turning on the scripts for one turns the scripts on for ALL - simultaneously. I'd rather retain the left sidebar list, or at least a link near the drop down menu to the blog list.
• On the other hand, having "Most Active" as the default choice (and thus the only one visible without scripts) is IMNSHO the better than it was.
• The center/primary column is organized wrong - "Surf the Channels" should be much higher up, and a lot of the other stuff should be moved into a side bar, or significantly shorter/compressed.
• Too big - Not sure if it's the font or what, but it's a rather pronounced leap in size from a blog post to the main page - kind of like going from a normal book to the large text version. People will set their fonts to a readable size on their own - don't do it for them. And that "Rightful Place" banner is a huge waste of space (compare it's whitespace to actual content).
• I happen to like the rightward column skew, since it makes it easier for me to browse the main and side column at the same time, but it's a bit wasted by having margins that are too large, vertically as well as horizontally.
• "Last 24 Hours" should be more prominent - at least put it in bold so it can be differentiated from the channels to it's right.
• Video, Peer Review, Community, and In Conversation are way out of place. The best I can come up with to fix that is to make Peer Review a regular channel, stick Video under the flickr thing on the right bar, make "Community" and events-item sidebar, and as for channel surfing...inset it with the promo area (where the "Rightful Place thing is), maybe.
• "This week in Scienceblogs" up where the banner ad is, isn't placed correctly - the div box is too small.
• MAJOR problem: "Channel Surfing" has titles and blogs reversed - the article title should be first and most prominent, and then have the blog title/author.
• Size issue again - channel surfing should be smaller - there's no need to have three rows when two worked perfectly in an even narrower column (I think).
• Sb International sidebar seems to be missing something...
• The "What We're Talking About" Header at the top doesn't match any of the header formats, making it look like a haphazard afterthought poorly placed.

So in short: appearance got mostly better, but readability got worse.

(btw, I was looking with scripts ON).

While you do have to do a bit of scrolling with this, I like that the boxes are laid out well. It still needs a bit of work, but I give it a 7.5.

The right side bar on the regular blog pages needs to be returned to its original 120 px width, as promised ages ago. What's up with that?