>We have released the new theme tonight for the site. This applies to the main site. This provides a better and direct exposure to the Jobs section as well as the user group meetings. The ability to add a new entry in those two sections is also supported directly as is from the menu. So, for those who only post in the support area about job entries or user group meeting entries, please, do post also in those sections as those are the prime sections for that content and this is what many people who do not use the support area are using for the monitoring of that content.
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>Several adjustments have also been applied in several places on the site. On the top, there is also a new item Testimonials. For those of you who appreciate the site, can you access that page and send me email for your appreciation of the site so we can add it in there. During these days, there has been a lot of work on the site and on related items and we are all working hard on increasing the members and the traffic. So, showing your appreciation is one additional step which would help in that direction.
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>Among this new version, the requested Last 10 replies to be shown in the Subscription panel is now supported. You can enable it from your account under the Subscription settings.
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>In the search, when there are more than 2000 results, we have made the small adjustment to show by most recents.
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>Another enhancements to ease the use of the support area could be released later on. I see many members have difficulties with the account settings, the notification of private messages and so on. With the experience gathered recently on social sites, we have found that this approach works really well. We might see some of that in the support area in the near future. For an overview of what this could look like as far as menus goes, you may take a look at a site I have been involved in recently:
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>http://www.levelxnightlife.com
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>Basically, the CONTENT menu is about what relates to the member. Another menu is specific to the search related options. The Account option is standard on top so is the case presently with the main site of the Universal Thread but is accessed from a different approach from the support area, which is somewhat of a problem. People are also used to read from the left when comes time to access their personal data. With the approach we have taken for the Level Extreme Nightlife site, a site which is for the general audience, which is completely different than this site which is targeted at highly technical skills IT people, we have found that this was a winning result. There is zero support needed on that site. The problem with the Universal Thread, it is that it has evolved based on the community needs over the years and we have reached a point in the early 2000 that it was extremely difficult to make it evolve. With the introduction of our new powerful .NET framework and a major new reorg, this is now something that we can work on. Such a design, which would eliminates a lot the use of icons to access the main options, would be much better to use. What is proposed would be pretty the same set of options, but from within a new environment much easy to use and easily understandable for new members. Basically, 90% would remain as is but some adjustments from the top and left side menu/toolbar would be applicable.

I'm a bit short on time so quick and dirty:

The one positive is that there is still a login on the start page so I do not need to search for it and can ignore the rest:

Overloaded, bad contrast, to much fonts.

Green on gray is a real paint to everybody with partial color blindness (around 10% of all people). Is there realy a need for all those effects? I have on some places a 64K connection only and this makes it even more painfull (IOW this is why I do not check UT in the evening or on weekends).
Why grey letters on whased out blue background? I think its hard to read.

I use ClearType maybe this fades those thiny stuff on left a right panel even more.

What I see is that your design does not fit into screen width, I have white bars left and right. So the central part (the one where I look for information) is squeezed without need. For all normal (not only on UT) operation I ignore any part on top left right for the expectation of advertisement. (Ad creep?)


HTH

Agnes