Новости

The main reasons for this redesign have been to improve the general usability of the site, especially for users browsing the site with lower resolution screens, and to improve the look and feel of the site for everyone, even Hattrickers using less common language versions.

While most changes are purely functional, we have had an ambition to make Hattrick a little cleaner and lighter to look at as well. We hope you like the new style of the site and the Hattrick logo! If you don’t, you can always choose a different skin for the site from the Preferences page. This will allow you to keep using a design similar to the classic Hattrick look.

One of the major changes is the removal of the page footer, which quite simply makes it possible for us to show more of the page. The footer used to take up a lot of vertical space on the page, making just a small part of the main pages viewable for low resolution screens. Also, for some languages that require a larger font size, the news ticker did not work as intended. We have moved the information from the footer to a new bar in the header, making it easy to access without taking up much vertical space. Another advantage of this is that you will be able to get quick access to your team page, series and current HT-time also when browsing the Hattrick conferences.

The latest news ticker (available for supporters) is now placed at the top of the screen. It is positioned there to keep date, time and time related
events close together. The “Clubhouse in focus” ad has been removed for now, but may appear somewhere else later on. Our new technology partner, Intel, will have a permanent logo placement under the main menu, as well as in the World Cup section. Intel will be the official sponsors of the Hattrick World Cup in Germany later this year, and they have some fun stuff planned for that event.

There are also a few changes to the main menu. The league selection dropdown has been moved to the bottom of the menu (to a new section called Shortcuts) to make more of the vital parts of the menu accessible on low resolution screens. The player icon that used to be beside the league selection has been removed to give the dropdown more space (it was too wide in some browsers). For supporters, the shortcut icons are now placed in the Shortcuts menu.

The Hattrick logo has changed a little, as well, now being green on white
rather than white on green. We wanted to create more space in the header, and also to make it less heavy, and for this reason we dropped the dark green background colour. The old style logo will still be available in the Hattrick Classic skin, though, which you can select on your Preferences pages.

What about banner spaces, then? The move of the Supporter news ticker to the header means there will be less room for traditional banners there. We do however need some form of banner space; both to communicate our own services and our partnerships. For the time being, we will use a smaller banner for Supporters and the regular one for non-Supporters. In the future we may experiment a little with other ad formats, for Supporters and non-Supporters alike, but the general idea will remain to keep the site clean and to find ad models that are efficient yet unobtrusive for the users.

This new layout has been developed together with a group of users interested in, and some even working professionally with, usability issues. Having an informal feedback group like this has been a great help in the redesign process, and in the final stages before release we have also got feedback from the Hattrick Gamemasters, Moderators and Language Administrators to make sure we are aware of local design issues.

The redesign project has been great fun. Quite a few different suggestions have been tried and discussed, and we are pleased with the result.

To go with these changes, we are also proud to introduce a new pack of icons for the whole site. We hope you enjoy the new look!