Over the last three days we’ve been steadily rolling out a new Tuts+ theme across all 8 sites. The new design is a refinement more than a big change, with lots of little improvements in usability and more suited to big screens. Read on to learn more about the redesign and lots of news about Plus!
1 The Plus Project
As you may know we have some pretty big plans for these Tuts+ sites. While today they are humble little tutorial blogs, we’ve thought for some time that it would be cool to build an entire platform for education. We’re going to call that platform Plus. You’ll know Plus content as our premium content, but no longer.
Our premium content is now ‘Premium’ (go figure!) and Plus is the brand for the educational platform we’re building, which, just like Psdtuts+, will be completely free for the most part.
With Tuts+ well established now, we’ve finally begun work on the project! We’ve acquired the domain Plus.org which will be the home of the new platform (yay for our first four letter domain!) We’ve also brought over our resident code genius Ryan Allen (who built our ActiveDen platform all by himself back in 2006) to team up with Tuts+ developer extraordinaire Fred Wu and kick ass front-end guru Derek Herman. And Skellie and I have been busy spec’ing out the plans for the new site, and it’s pretty, damn cool if I do say so myself!
Right now the Tuts+ sites are fairly passive, but we’d like to get the whole community involved in writing, teaching, answering questions and generally learning. The new Plus.org platform promises to incorporate all that plus some nifty ideas we’ve taken from gaming to come together into a social education platform.
It’s going to take a long time and we’re going to roll it all out in pieces over the next 2 years. We’re super excited about it all, and I hope I’ll have more updates in the coming months!
2 Creative Sessions and Mobiletuts+
While Plus.org will take a long time, we do have some new goodies coming much sooner including Creative Sessions which is being built now, and also Mobiletuts+ which will be all about mobile development!
3 Server Update
About a week and a half ago we had some major problems with our servers. I’m happy to say that we’ve now completely resolved these issues by moving hosts and reengineering our hosting setup completely from scratch. The new setup is much quicker and has a much greater capacity for growth, so fingers crossed, that will be the last server outage for a long time to come!
4 The Redesign
The new theme has a few neat features you may want to check out including:
- Basix!
While Tuts+ has always been known for intermediate to advanced level content, we’ve been thinking it’d be good to separate out tutorials and articles better suited to people just getting started. So we’ve created the Basix tag for quick browsing. You’ll find it in the top menu, and expect to see more Basix content soon as we beef up our library of novice-friendly content. - Easy access to Videos, Tips and Premium Posts
We’ve also started tagging videos, tips and Premium membership posts so that along with Basix content you can quickly find what you’re after. We’re generally going to be working to clean up our category/tagging across the network in the coming months to get it more standardized. - Tutorial Details on Posts
We’re also going to start standardizing all tutorials to have a "Tutorial Details" section at the top with difficulty and other pertinent details. Eventually we’ll get all the archives updated … but with over 2000 tutorials, that will take a while! - Bigger, more readable content area
We’ve expanded the site to be optimized for bigger 1280px wide screens, with a bit of JavaScript to resize for smaller resolutions. This has given us the space to clean up the content area to be a bit bigger and more readable generally. - Latest Creattica content for inspiration
We’ve also started porting over the latest Creattica content into our sidebars. There’s actually a redesign of Creattica coming in the next few weeks and we’ll be expanding the gallery to cover even more types of inspiration. The new sidebar widget will give even more exposure to those talented creatives on Creattica! - General UI Improvements
Most of the improvements on the new design are small, subtle improvements such as a reduction in the number of clicks needed to browse categories, a clearer search field, faster loading pages and generally cleaner, more optimized code.
One change that we have also made is to remove the community link feed. Over the years this was a great way to get exposure to community links, but unfortunately was also home to a lot of spam. So with this iteration we’ve left it behind.
Also at the moment sites with Flickr groups don’t have it showing, but don’t worry that’ll be back. There’s just a problem with our Flickr plugin at the moment!!
There are still some more tweaks to do to the new design and a lot of post formatting to do to get our archives matching up with the new theme. But for all intents and purposes the new theme is now alive and well! Enjoy!
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mmmm… but i think there is something wrong with images in “Related Posts”
anyway …GOOOO Tuts :)
WOW! Very good Design.
and I like the way your sidebar behave the screen resolution.
I like the new header…
Damn Envato is notorious for making the best UI redesigns! Best of luck though out these upcoming years!
What?
I love this design :x
very clear and nice design :x
I love this basix section, great!
I’m sorry, I didn’t check the redesign but I noticed a “little” bug. When comming from the feedburner link no CSS (and apparently no JS) is loaded. You might want to check this ;)
Example (from netvibes): http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/news/redesign-and-other-tuts-news/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nettuts+(NETTUTS)&utm_content=Netvibes
Ouch… Same with the comments link:
http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/news/redesign-and-other-tuts-news/comment-page-1/#comment-222048
Awesome theme, and all the best for plus.org….
First comment after redesign :)
All the best ENVATO…..
Great! The best just got better.
I’m curious about the new server setup. Any details? What about a tutorial on that topic? :)
I am a system admin for websites, I would also love to see what the original problems were, and what the fixes are.
For other who need to host their client sites with hosting providers it would be good to know what a site of this size uses. I have to host my own sites with my own servers and am considering moving to a hosted solution.
thanks
pretty neat.. a new layout with out changing the feel of it. 10/10 for the UI.
Is it just me or did the CSS on this site decide to take time off? All I see is an unstyled HTML page wherever I go on the site!
Sane thing here.
Same here…
wish you a bright future
so is this the new design?
No css?
Nice….
lol, maybe they have problem in updating the theme.
yup, it must some kind of a new trend in modern web design ;)
back to basix, times with no css =)
anyway, can’t wait for the changes. what’s the timescale for mobiletuts?
The new site is without CSS? :)
style.css – 404 Not Found
It’s a nice design, but personally I think it’s a bit too wide, kinda just seems like a way to fit more ads in above the fold!
Yeah at first glance I also thought this new design is only for more ads. So much ads is realy a boring thing.
I’m not seeing any styling at all… :(
Loving the new design, especially the ultra-clean comments section. :D Looking forward to all the stuff you’ve announced. :)
Love the fact that the comment box is accessible for blind people.
Is it no CSS day today? I don’t see any styling at all which is very strange!
And again (like latest Su/Mo) the Plus Content is not available.
For example:
This Will Change the Way you Code your CSS
http://tutsplus.com/s3.php?file=http://nettutsplus.s3.cdn.plus.org/49_scaffolding/scaffold.mp4
> Server not found
> Firefox can’t find the server at nettutsplus.s3.cdn.plus.org.
hmm, can’t find the stylesheet, hope you get it fixed soon…
I really like it, a great way to renew the tuts+ network :)
site looks awesome. small bug in the facebook icon in the right column. http://facebook.com/nettuts should be http://www.facebook.com/nettutsplus
Not everyone has screen resolution 1200px. Looks horrible on my screen.
Still around 25% of users have resolution lower than 1200 and in 1024px sidebar is too small.
I like the new design a lot (Valen’s work?). But I think there is a bug in the sorting engine. The frontpage is displaying posts by Number of Comments order. For instance, “Digging into WordPress” is the first post.
I’m assuming that’s a bug and this will be worked out to display content in Date Added format. Or maybe I just looked at the site at the wrong time.
Regardless, I’m with David in wishing you guys good luck with everything. You’re truly making the internet a really nice place. Thanks for all the work over these years – especially Jay Way.
Anyone else appreciate how well their content is laid out with CSS disabled?
That’s the new style. =)
I was just thinking the same thing. It’s odd to see no styling, but the site is still fairly usable.
Hm, I have to say I think I liked the old one better! This sidebar is too strung out and I kept finding myself distracted from the actual content (most important aspect of the site) to look at the new elements that kept scrolling into view on the right. Not to mention that the Twitter area is like 5px too wide so I’ve got the horizontal scroll bar showing up at the bottom of the screen.
Overall I like the wider content area, however a few tweaks need to be made so that the sidebar is more concise, more organized, same width elements, and much, much less distracting.
Scratch that last comment, the CSS must’ve been broken when I was looking at the sidebar now. It looks better now, just a little bid of ad overload in the top right.
It feels very clean now, i like very much.
well done guys ;)
I like the minimalist approach – call it sans – css.
Great redesign! I am very excited to see the new
mobiletuts site.
Keep up the good work!
Love the basix section. Great work guys!
Uh-Oh…
Content Delivery Network Fail
is DNS still propagating or something?!
Aww Shucks I must have caught the site at a time when they are updating there css files. I just see standard html without any styling. :-)
DNS is still propagating across the internets, if you want to see the site with all it’s css glory add this to your hosts file (if you know how to find/edit it)
216.156.249.147 net.tutsplus.cdn.plus.org
That was it. Seems to work fine from my Clear Internet Connection but not working with my office connection so it must be the dns update. Site looks good though.
New Design? where’s the css files? Something wrong happed with nettuts?
Na. nothings wrong i don’t think. I think we have learned that the DNS is still updating on some networks as the files are hosted here..
net.tutsplus.cdn.plus.org
which brings me to my question. Is there any benefits to hosting your css and script files from another location rather then locally?
Love the new design! :)
Keep up the great work Envato!
I love the new design, however i hate the fact that when i get on the homepage, i actually see articles from all over 2009. Now you have click on both the articles and tutorial menu items, just to see if there is something new. If possible, please change it back, because in my opinion this isn’t an upgrade, but a downgrade :(
The design is perfect, but chrome shows no style, and in FF and IE8 most of the articles have no picture. The problem occurs in all tutsplus blogs, I hope it is just because these blogs are under construction, just thought I have to report.
Thanks Envato for all these efforts.
.post_image requires max width. see http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/news/professional-frontend-engineering/
WHAT IN HELL HAVE YOU DONE?!
CSS wouldn’t load, Javascript seems to be broken:
Fehler: $(“#sidebar”).tutsResize is not a function
Quelldatei: http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/news/redesign-and-other-tuts-news/
Zeile: 27
This happens with Firefox 3.6 (cache deleted!). Without css your site looks like… a pope without his cowl^^ Fix it, please!
I really like the new design, it sort of reminds me of the envato website. Great job!
Hey guys,
We seem to be having a problem with our Content Delivery Network not delivering images and/or CSS for people in some places. Talk about bad timing!
Anyhow the devs are trying some fixes, hopefully the problems won’t last too long and then you will see the *actual* redesign, not the super unstyled page ;-)
Thanks for your patience!
Site is wicked. I like how big everything got. I see you incorporated that one jquery screen size tut into the advertisement bar. Nice job.
Very nice, keep up all the great work!
Still a load of little errors. But im sure they will be fixed in due time. Per usual =).
Nice revamp.
Look so nice but… please, add moneybookers to payment system. I want a plus account but i dont have credit card :| and i think its a problem, i now few people who really want to buy plus account but are cant
Basix section is great, just what I needed.
Great redesign by the way, I think it’s a lot better than before.
hmmm, I wish you also include like a little sidebar , about popular articles..and tutorials but anyway the tuts network redesign is a cool ,its much cleaner . :)
I see now the popular posts for the month…haha I like it
Two words: Envato rocks! :)