RELEASE COMING!

@hungryinaz

Recipe Ratings will be going out soon in our next release. Our next release will include many improvements to our recipe experience, stay tuned, our aim is to get that phase rolled out in early fall.

Design_Team in Site Talk

Hover Menus

Apologies for the late reply regarding this thread.

We implemented a fix for this behavior about two months back that adds a lag time to the drop down menus.

--CHOW

Design_Team in Site Talk

Hover Menus

We hear you and agree that the current functionality is not a great user experience. It's on our short list of site revisions. What we plan to implement is a slight lag to the action of the menu dropping down so you have to hoover for a second before the menu actually lowers. This should take care of the "flashing" of menus. Thanks for your patience while we work on this fix.

Design_Team in Site Talk

Suggestion: increase prominence of "add this user to your reading list"

Finlero,
Thanks for pointing this out.

We will be including a style fix in upcoming modifications to MyCHOW pages. I cannot promise an exact date but I can tell you we are trying to work in a batch of upgrades to MyChow in the first few months of 09.

-DT

Design_Team in Site Talk

Suggestion for page change: more indents, limit right column

Thanks for the suggestion.

It is something we want to do and we are looking into the specifics of what it will take to implement. I can't give a time estimate at this moment but I can assure you we want to make this happen as soon as possible.

Design_Team in Site Talk

"SPECIAL COVERAGE" still not right

Thanks for the report Chuckles. We will adjust this asap.

Design_Team in Site Talk

Thanksgiving Vegetable sides

Just came across your thread and thought this story on CHOW could be helpful here, it's a list of 10 vegetarian Thanksgiving recipes.

http://www.chow.com/stories/11392

Design_Team in Home Cooking

Creative Director of Chow Thinks Your Comments are "Worthless"

I’d like to set the record straight regarding my statements at last nights panel discussion.

For starters I in no way referred to the comments on Chow/Chowhound as worthless. I agree the way this article is written it would seem that this is something uttered from my lips specifically about the Chowhound community, that is simply not the case.

As you read through my post I want you all to keep in mind this was a peer to peer panel discus ion of the issues concerning designers switching their careers from print to web.

To clarify how this was taken out of context let’s start with the question I was responding to.

A member of the audience asked what we on the panel thought of those ever present commenters who leave jokey/snide comments on news stories and such and should that kind of thing be allowed. Does it bother us? What do we do about it?

There was a moment of silence... it seemed like my colleagues were reluctant to speak so I jumped in. I said that comments are the nature of the web and that they are something that we live with good / bad and learn from. I explained a little bit how Chowhound is moderated in order to keep the value of the discussion top notch and on point but the comments on Chow stories not as much as they are opinions of an editorial story. (Obviously if we uncover someone leaving a comment is a shill for a company or restaurant etc. We will take the posts off a Chow story. This is generally done by the edit team which is not the same team as the moderators on CH)

I also talked briefly regarding advertisers attitudes towards discussion boards in general (not just on Chow but I referenced the paradigm of Chow/Chowhound as an example) because the truth is advertisers are weary ( I did not use the word terrified as the article suggests) of having their brands represented near content that is not controlled. They feel for example What if a thread starts on how much user X hates Dunkin Donuts while my DD ad is sitting right there on the page next to it? This potential conflict is not seen as very attractive to brand managers as you might imagine.

These kinds of scenarios weigh heavy on advertisers minds. This is not a secret to anyone in the web industry but to those who are interested in changing their design careers from print to web (this was the narrow focus /niche of the audience) It’s something I thought they should be aware of.

When I said “do I think most of those types of comments are worthless?, Yes I do” I was referring to the question asked above regarding those unconstructive comments that are like junk mail littering up web pages.

That was the context.

For the record I did not refer to CH as chatty, the word chatty was never in play and is not a word I use, period.

I’d like you all to know I take my job and this site very seriously. Everyone who works or has worked with me in the past knows this.

It’s outrageous to think that I would find comments on the site I devote the majority of my waking life to as “worthless”. I am concerned that in this article I was represented in a way that offended some of you here however I can’t control that.

I always liked the way Jane once described the Chowhound community as the “Lifeblood of the site”. We would be nothing without you, your comments and your quality discussions.

I hope this clarifies the issue. I’ll keep my eye on this thread, Let me know if you have any further questions regarding this topic and or if my comments here are not clear.

Thanks for reading through this long post and more importantly thanks for continuing to comment on this site!

-Jeremy

Design_Team in Site Talk

Here comes the new look!

Imagery is coming to the blog pages. There is some there that isn't being called correctly yet and we are working on it. Agreed that it's pretty dense right now with nothing breaking up the text. ALso there are some formatting issue to be fixed that will clean those pages up.

The most serious offender of a large drop down is the Chowhound drop down and we are working on a fix right now for that.

Design_Team in Site Talk

Here comes the new look!

Thanks for the screenshots, very helpful. We have seen that issue of links running outside of boxes and are looking into it. The Netscape screenshot is quite a mess, we will do what we can reagarding that browsers interpretation of the site.

Design_Team in Site Talk

Here comes the new look!

Thanks for the screenshot.

By enlarging your browser I am referencing, for instance on a mac platform, when the user hits apple plus or minus to enlarge or reduce the size of the web page.

OK we will address this...Our fix that we were looking into during BETA was to extend the drop to four columns...we will however do more detailed research to make sure we put a fix in place that sticks for all users.

Design_Team in Site Talk

Here comes the new look!

We are working out kinks for sure. I have to say Netscape 7.2 is in the extreme minority of browsers people use to surf our site..the percentage is well under 1% We try to optimize the site to work properly for the majority of browsers people are using. We will look into this however and see what can be done.

Design_Team in Site Talk

Here comes the new look!

They are not supposed to show up there actually. Our thinking is that they will add to much height to the list. If they are not present you can scan more topics on your screen.

Design_Team in Site Talk

Here comes the new look!

re: CH dropdown. We are looking into better ways to tuck this list up for those of you that enlarge your browsers. We will rollout an adjustment as soon as we can. It's going to take a bit of time to research a solid solution but we are on it.

Design_Team in Site Talk

Here comes the new look!

10-4 We will bump that up, it will take us a little while to get to it, but I promise we will take a look and address.

Design_Team in Site Talk

Here comes the new look!

Hey MMRuth, What OS and Browser are you on?

The names are showing up the correct size on my OS (mac osx firefox).

We will try to fix the issue you are having.

Design_Team in Site Talk

Here comes the new look!

There are functional changes, some of which are the combining of our blog content and exposing search on each board page. Renaming categories in the navigation so they make more sense and utilizing a rollover dropdown in the nav bar because we felt many people were missing the little arrow indicators on the right of each category. Also we have introduced a third column promo unit that exposes board content in a more accessible way.

On the design side we needed to neutralize the palette of the site so we can display recipes and food related visuals without a large maroon cast on everything. We also added a font called Georgia to mix up textures and increase readability. This site previously used just one font which made creating hierarchies of information in text a problem.

These are not all the changes but some highlights of whats been changed so far.

Design_Team in Site Talk