Latest improvements to CLUAS

Last night I rolled out some tweaks to the navigation bar across good chunks of the site. You won't see the changes on this page (I will get around to doing the CLUAS blog and forum pages later tonight) but you will see it on the home page and any page that does NOT end with ".aspx" in its address.

In a nutshell: the navigation bar is being moved to just below the CLUAS logo (previously the nav bar was to right of the logo, where it has been for ages).

Why is this being done? This is a first step in a roll out of a complete refresh of the CLUAS look and feel. A few quick points about the change that has been implemented so far:

1. It means we can have more items in the navigation bar becuase the nav bar now runs across the full width of the screen (the way it has been up to now meant we had to have a limited number of items on the nav bar as the bar had less space and too many items on the nav bar meant it would wrap around and "break" into two lines on screens of lower resolution).
2. This week I also created a new 'interviews' page containing links to all of the 50+ interviews CLUAS has done over the years (this page and its links have been spun off from the long standing Features home page, the need to do this was something I realised when I recently analysed the full archive of CLUAS content). This new interviews home page - its creation being really just a bit of "content housekeeping" - is now linked from the new nav bar and will make the archive of CLUAS interviews more easily accessible to readers and search engines.
3. Some of the space in the top right hand corner that has been freed up by this change is now running Google Ads. The intention however is not to run Google ads here all the time but to also run ads from local acts (publicising album releases / gigs / etc) and to allow them to run these ads for free. The DotNetNuke system that CLUAS uses for managing the site already has the technology built in for uploading and rotating non-Google banner ads. I need to implement this once the new nav bar is fully rolled out across the full site. Look out for an announcement on how bands can take advantage of this.

While this change is fairly discreet - I think some regulars may not even notice it - it sets CLUAS up for a far more visible shake up of the site's look and feel in the coming months.

Update 30 October: The nav bar for album and gig reviews as well as blogs has been updated (although you may need to hit 'refresh' in your browser to see it properly). Pages that have not yet been updated with the new nav bar are the discussion forum, Gigs of the Fortnight, the 'Features' and the 'Write for CLUAS' pages. They should be sorted in the coming days.

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