To see the design use the upper navigation or click here for the index or here for the article page.
I decided to create this facelift instead of playing games during my May Day holiday. The possible prize was a bonus.
As I read the 'rules' I decided that I'm not going to do any content manipulation. Instead I focused on creating a nicer site with the same layout.
I am not a regular user of slashdot maybe because I think it's currently really ugly.
Some parts of the site have not been tackled yet (eg. the user page) so they might look ugly with the realtime preview.
I removed the stupid icons from the header and utilized that space to include user data (login or loggedin boxes). It seems a smart thing to do since the left column now only contains content navigation.
I added some scripting to change the top links that can be used to skip to parts of content.
I played around a bit with the article layout but decided to leave it as is.
I also added styles for the tagging. I'm going to leave it as is unless somebody wants me to complete the work for an alternate stylesheet (or I win the competition:).
I changed the /. that Rob still doesn't care about and stole the indenting from one of the other entries.
I changed the green a bit but not to a strong #066 which I really don't like that much.
I wanted to recreate the header since the font/logo is really weird. The logic behind the five icons is weird and I'd really like to see how many people actually use them. To create a new logo would be an overkill since I'm not really a designer so I just used the Myriad typeface with the / and . around it and add a bit of shading to make it more appealing. After rereading the 'rules' I decided to try it with the curve and the Coliseo font - it's not that bad but I like the alternate header better.
I decided the sidebar blocks should look the same on both sides and that the width of the columns should be liquid. The width on wide screens really makes the content really hard to read. I used the /. as a list item icon as a detail. I think it works fine.
To make the content more readable I increased the line height to 1.5 which really helps the readability. The serif font on the current page doesn't work well in italics so I changed it to Verdana (sans-serif).
Since I wanted the content to stand out I only added a light background to help visually divide pieces of information (articles, comments).
The comments were difficult to recreate. I wanted to decrease the vertical size so I disabled the <br> elements in the details. I moved the 'Reply to this' to the right so it doesn't obstruct the flow of reading. The threads are displayed with the /. list item icon and are indented just enough.
I also added some javascript color coding that might not be obvious enough but I think it works well to add a bit of color.
The footer was changed a bit to gain power. The search is exposed and the quote has it's own space.
In IE the demonstration in frames develops a horizontal scrollbar for no obvious reason. The normal site doesn't (copy the link and try if you don't belive me).
In IE some of the CSS cannot be applied without changing the HTML a bit (besides the whitespace only a few class names were added in the example HTMLs).
The facelift was developed on Mozilla 1.73 and also checked on IE 6.0.2900, Firefox 1.0.7. I hear Safari 1.3 and Opera8 work as well.
The facelift was done by fry at friedcellcollective.