If you wondering why we have been dragging our feet on the news front these past few weeks, it’s because we were busy with the HTML5’s and CSS’s of our brand new template. True, the feel and the design have remained more or less the same with some subtle changes in the aesthetics and the size of our site, which is slightly more compact, but almost everything underneath is new.

Think of Carscoop Version 5.0 as something like a new Porsche; while the looks remain the same (to the previous Version 4.3), everything else is new or revamped. In our case, this should translate to a better experience on most modern browsers and more importantly, faster speeds regardless the connection.

The reason why we kept the design close to our previous theme is because we’re actively looking to do a complete overhaul of the site, but given that this may take some time as it will be done by a third party, we decided to do a swift, in-house update.

The layout has remained the same, and as many of you are already aware of for some time now, you can check out a more compact version of our front-page stories by clicking the Carscoop Mini tab on top. In addition, we’ve activated the mobile version of Carscoop, which automatically changes the layout of our site when using a smart phone browser. Finally, there’s also a new photo viewer.

Even though we’ve tried to iron out all the kinks, there’s a possibility we may have missed something so we’d appreciate your input on any problems as well as your thoughts on the subtle restyling and what we should change.

Time for a new commenting system?

We were also contemplating on whether or not to ditch the standard blogger comment system for Disqus, which has many advantages such as real-time comments, a vastly superior interface, the ability to add videos and photos directly in the comments section, flag users and much more. We tried it out during the testing phase of our redesign, and the only downside we found was that in some cases, the speed was affected, though this may be fixed with some tweaking – at least that’s what we’ve heard. You can get an idea of the Disqus commenting system in action by looking at this website here. Tell us what you think in the comments section below.

  • Update 1: On certain browsers (i.e. Firefox 4 running on a Mac), a glitch with the search bar code caused the contents of the top box to be pushed down whenever the zoom was not set to 100%. It should be fixed now, but if you continue to have a problem, post the type of browser and the machine you’re running it on and we’ll look into it.

By John Halas

Opening image credits: Ford