TALES UNION NEWS

Cleaning Up The Site

If you have been following our Twitter account lately, you may have noticed us talking about some changes that were going on around the site --- and that a news post would be made about said changes. We just finished the majority of the edits and felt it was time to make that news post.

Instead of adding new functionality to the site, these changes instead were made to improve and expand on what had already existed. The first thing you should notice is icons next to the news on the front page, as well as the monthly archives and tags pages. Since these areas have different groups of news listed, having an icon to quickly identify them by makes a lot more sense.

Next, the social bookmarking links have been moved to the bottom of the content area. Since many users would usually bookmark a page after they're read it, we thought it would be more sense to have it there instead at the beginning of the content. We are planning to add more functionality there in the future, such as the ability to print the page, etc.

One of the major changes was in the Image Gallery and Fan Submissions pages (more on the name change later in the post). Before, all of the full views of the images were done using the zoom JavaScript, which for smaller images was fine, but didn't allow the larger images to be properly shown in their full detail. In every section in the Image Gallery (except for Wallpaper, which already opened the wallpapers in a new tab), the full-sized images will open up in a new tab. What this means is that each image will have a link which can be easily used to link back to that image. We'll be adding social bookmarking links, etc. shortly to these pages to make sharing them easier. This also applies to Fan Submissions page, which also has the added bonus of pagination for the icons page (no more 1000+ icons loading up :)).

As you will notice in the main navigation menu (the "blue" bar), we've renamed and moved around some of the existing links. We went back to the old drop-down menu used in the previous layout due to usability concerns once too many links were added. We also renamed some of the sections to make it more clear (Imagery vs Imagery Gallery, for example) which section they were (the links are the same, just the headings are different).

There were a few other minor edits related to the layout (you should notice the layout properly "stretches" and doesn't have that white border like it used to), but nothing major.

We are planning on rolling out some new sections in the next few months, as well as publicly releasing the Mobile version of the website. So be sure to check back often during the next few months to see what new stuff we've added!

Other Related News

	Our New and Improved Video and Trailers Sections Sat, Jan 23rd, 2010, 10:45 pm (EST) by Shawn We've just updated the Videos and Trailer section on Tales Union.
	Tales Union Imagery Section Relaunches 26 September 2009 by Shawn After about a month's worth of work, the Imagery is now back online.
	Video Section Is Now Live 12 September 2009 by Shawn The Video section is now back online.
	Tales Union's New (Temp) Layout 30 August 2009 by Shawn Welcome to Tales Union's new (temporary) layout (codenamed Tales 3.
	New Layout, New Look 29 June 2009 by Shawn If you were visiting the site during the last few hours, you may have noticed that there was an offline message present.
	Tales Union Goes Mobile! 27 May 2009 by Shawn Use a mobile phone, or an internet browser on electronics such as the Nintendo DSi or PlayStation Portable? Tales Union now has a mobile version available for you.
	Welcome To The New Tales Union! 18 May 2009 by Shawn Welcome to the new Tales Union! We've been working on getting this ready for the last few weeks, and it includes a bunch of changes that will help the site grow and expand in the future.