PentaxForums Homepage Face-Lift

New design live!

By PF Staff in Site News on Oct 31, 2011

Happy Halloween, Pentaxians!

In July, we brought a fresh new look to our forum - one that has received praise not only by our members, but by other forum owners and users accross the web.

Today we're happy to unveil our redesigned mainsite!  After hours of hard work by our own administrator, Adam, and Sam of digitalvb.com, we present to you a layout that puts all of our content right at your fingertips.  From a redesigned navigation system to a more readable page layout, the new design is full of refinements that will enhance your browser experience.

We'd like to thank all our members for their continued donations, which make site improvements such as this one possible!

Below we will outline the highlights of the new homepage.  We hope you enjoy it!

Login Integration

You can now log in directly on our homepage using your forum account.  Furthermore, whenever you are logged in on the forum, you will be able to see the number of new posts and unread private messages while browsing the homepage.

The whole login system is built using the latest web technologies, meaning that a page refresh is not required in order to log in or out.

Enhanced Sidebar

The new sidebar gives you an overview of our latest content, including forum threads, in-depth reviews, Pentax news, and special site sections.

The recent reviews module shown the five latest reviews as well as the ratings that each product received, if applicable.

New Navbar

We've made the new navbar collapsible so that it doesn't take up too much precious space.  All content is grouped into categories.  Links that aren't filed under the "Pentax Mainsite" or "In-Depth Reviews" headings will take you to other sections of the site.

You will also find an easily-accessible search box directly above the navbar, which allows you to search our entire site using Google.  If you want to search just our forum or lens databases, you can do so from inside those sections.

Breadcrumbs

Perhaps the biggest improvement to the homepage was the addition of breadcrumbs to supplement the navbar.  The breadcrumbs, found to the right of the search box at the top of the page, tell you exactly where you are and where you came from.

Once again, we hope you enjoy the new layout! We'd like to hear what you think about it in this forum thread!  We will still be ironing out a few issues over the coming days, so please pardon any potential virtual dust!