In the spirit of this Discussion Board, which at its best has always respected honest and vigorous debate.....
Nearly a month after the redesign, I'm not convinced it has made GCA a better website, either to use or to navigate. In fact, several parts of the redesign have made the website noticeably less user-friendly.
Some of the elements of the redesign are arguably superficial, and open to differences in taste. For instance, I find the pink/salmon motif off-putting, not nearly as attractive as the rich, brown hues of the prevision site. The typefaces used for the various sections are skinny and light, not bold, and thus don't stand out.
But other concerns are more substantial:
-- The stark white background is like a good song on radio turned up too loud. It's not enough to turn me away from the site, but it's bothersome -- just too bright.
-- The In My Opinion is organized alphabetically by author, instead of a different way, such as by topic or course. That may be fine for GCA veterans (for instance, I know if I want to learn more about Olympia Fields, I just go to Terry Lavin's piece, because I know from the Discussion Board that no one knows that course better than him). But I wonder about folks like...me, who happened upon this website accidently, looking for information about a particular course (Machrihansih), and found a rich trove of stuff -- the richest trove I've yet seen on the Web -- about golf architecture. Yes, I know the subject is right next to the author's name -- but that seems to me a poor way to organize some of the very best information on this site (those who know courses most intimately). It seems organized for those of us who participate and look at GCA frequently, as opposed to those outside the GCA community who may simply be interested in learning more about a particular course or architectural subject.
-- The Courses by Country section is missing the "next page" links for those articles (frequently, the newer ones, because they have more photos) at the end of the first page. True, the second part of such articles is now on the side, but again, that's much less user-friendly than the previous site.
-- The Feature Interviews simply list authors by date; with such a significant redesign, I had hoped these could be organized with a clearer link to the author's subject matter. For instance, I refer frequently to George Bahto's descriptions of Macdonald/Raynor template holes. I can find it easily because, as a GCA veteran, I know that George's article is definitive. For the casual or first-time visitor to GCA, the Feature Interview list has no context -- again, well-known to the website veteran, but not to someone who has first come across a template hole like a Redan and wanted to learn more about it.
-- The Discussion Group posts are differentiated by thin lines, instead of the boxes in the previous site. The new look is disjointed; it's often hard to distinguish between the comments of the poster, the tag lines often associated with such posters, and the next posting. The previous boxes made such elements -- including the reply/modify/quote buttons -- much easier to find and use.
-- Most disconcertingly, the Discussion Group threads now feature a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of individual posts, as opposed to the bottom of the page (noted by Ed Oden in reply #60 of this thread). This is perhaps the most nonn-user-friendly aspect of the new design. I find myself drawn more often to photo threads than any other subject on the Discussion Board; collectively, they are an incredibly rich and fascinating look into golf architecture, reaffirming Tom Paul's big-world theory of golf design. More often than not, the photos in such threads are best viewed big and wide -- for all the focus we often have on GCA about length, golf design and architecture is most interesting (to me) by looking at its width. The Discussion Board website format ought to do everything it can to promote big and wide photos, not some of the truncated ones we've seen with the redesign (Rich Hetzels' terrific Waterbury thread comes immediately to mind -- think of how much better his photos of a great old course would like big and wide, instead of the boxes used in this thread:
http://golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,39795.0.htmlAs many have said better than I, Ran and Ben deserve our collective thanks for hosting such a site, and maintaining its very high standards for content and debate. As Shivas has pointed out, it remains -- by far -- the best source on the Web for insights into golf architecture and its history, as well as passionate and insightful debate about it. And contrary to some here, I think the Discussion Board (after its annual winter lull) has had a very good run of threads lately -- several terrific photo essays from all points of the world (Notts, Austrailia, New England), solid debates on topics such as about fairway width and the relative merits of Tillinghast par 3s, and wonderful stories like the Ferris Wheel and Pine Valley.
I hope some elements of the redesign can be re-thought, to make the look and utility of the site as good as the content it contains.