WHO THINKS LETSRUN DOESN'T NEED A "RE-DESIGN"!!

I don't think it does, but it wouldn't really bother me either. I'm sure the Brojos will choose a good new design what with the contest and all. Perhaps there could be a poll as well among nominated layouts.

I think they should use CSS so that users can choose their own layout from a set of themes.

A redesign would be fine with me, as long as the amount of info on the main forum page stays the same. I like being able to see roughly 40-50 topics on the screen at once.

A color change to darker background would be much welcomed. Easier on the eyes.

I don't agree....

.... with you.

They should donate the money to charity and keep the design the same. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Would the Drudge Report change their design? Doubt it.

Absolutely not. Leave the site as it is. That's the appeal. Otherwise I'd just read Runners World.

DONT CHANGE THE DESIGN

BUT

FIX THE SITE SO IT CAN HANDLE TRAFFIC ON DAYS LIKE NCAA XC NATIONALS.

i like the site the way it is now. after reading the official LRC announcement, this line stuck out: "For those you not real smart, 300*250 is very close to being a square." i doubt change is coming.

What I don't want to see:

-a bunch of useless, memory-hogging flash just to make the site look "modern" or "attractive"

-extensive visuals or complicated images on the homepage

What I want to see:

-a better color scheme for most of the site

-a nice simplistic but organized layout for the home page and message board - my one complaint now is that things look too cluttered/thrown together

trackshark, dyestat, flotrack, runnersworld, and every other track and field website you can think of have infinitely superior designs than Letsrun.com

NONE OF THEM ARE NEARLY AS POPULAR

The "cluttered and thrown together" look people are complaining about is the reason information is so easily accessible on this site, as you don't have to click on subsections or think about what section something would be under...you just have to glance over whatever the brojos think is interesting which is usually what the most important information is...

That's what makes the message board so much better than the other message boards as well...professional, college, high school, threads about colon cancer...they're all on one page and you can just scroll through and click on whatever you want to read...I don't see any reason to change it

Granted the colors are ugly and keeping them would be more of a comfort issue but if they changed it wouldn't be a tragedy, I'd prefer if they'd remain the same as well

All in all...no changes are necessary

I'm leaning towards the no-redesign camp, but I'm thinking of having a go at the contest anyway. I do have several specific things in mind, but I'm not the only one who reads letsrun. So I'm soliciting *specific* suggestions for what you think could be done better. Me? I wish that front page would degrade gracefully on a small screen, like an iPhone or Palm Pilot. CSS, if used properly, could make this happen."a miler" also had suggestions above, though it would be nice to be more specific about the "better color scheme" and how "simplistic" the layout might be.

a miler wrote:

-a better color scheme for most of the site

-a nice simplistic but organized layout for the home page and message board - my one complaint now is that things look too cluttered/thrown together

I think the site is cluttered, but I wouldn't care what it looked like if they would just add RSS feeds.

Leave it alone- uncomplicated, unadorned.

to change it would be like going running with an iPod and fuel belt.

The site does not need change! We are runners. We do not care how flashy, colorful, or shiny the website or our shoes look. We care about the basics: how they perform. The website is great as is. We do not need any new, fancy high-tech modulations. Why try to fix something that works great and isn't broken?

(Well really the message board could be fixed so it doesn't crash after just about every major race, but the site design is fine!)

We definitely don't need flash but that isn't the point of the redesign. At the very least we could clean things up and not have the homepage go down 6 pages.

A viewer a few years ago sent me the same design just cleaned up and it was better. I think after that I made it so the links didn't have underlines for a few days and no one even seemed to notice.

Trust us we don't want to become a Runnersworld. There is a reason we're the most popular independent running site, what we have works. The goal isn't to be the biggest but we don't want to drive people away with some unnecessary change.

as long as it stays information rich and easily accessible I don't care.

wejo, don't worry about a redesign. Just fix your shitty, outdated, overwhelmed servers that preclude people from logging on to the message board in a timely fashion or chew up a newly penned post and send it to oblivion before it even makes its appearance. Nothing more frustrating than the lack of utility and convenience. Everything else is fine though.

trackshark, dyestat, flotrack, runnersworld, and every other track and field website you can think of have infinitely superior designs than Letsrun.com

NONE OF THEM ARE NEARLY AS POPULAR

every other website has infinitely superior

NONE OF THEM IS NEARLY AS POPULAR

And please save a few ellipses for the other posters. You've got many other punctuation and grammar options at your disposal.

And Wejo, fix your link on the front page regarding the change!

"After 8 years of getting sick of having to apologize to people for our lack of design, we're having a homepage re-design contest for letsrun.com."

==> points to the Kamel Citizenship article.