As hinted in a post yesterday, DOAJ is getting a nip and a tuck today, to make way for larger projects later this year:
A completely new search front-end. It looks very similar to the old one, but with some major improvements under-the-hood (more powerful, more responsive, more accessible), and gives us the capability to build better, cooler interfaces in the future.
At 3pm BST today, we will start an upgrade to two elements of the site: Bootstrap and Edges. Bootstrap is ‘an open source toolkit for developing with HTML, CSS, and JS’ and is what we use to display the site. Edges is Cottage Lab’s own open source library for presenting the search and navigation capabilities to the user.
What’s changing?
Users will see that much of the orange colour in search results and navigation is replaced with grey. This colour may be temporary until a full redesign is carried out.
Some standardisation has been applied to the treatment of navigation and sorting features, like buttons, dropdowns, etc
The site will be much more responsive on smaller screens.
The fonts will be cleaner and easier to read, on large and smaller screens.
Some accessibility changes, one step on our way to becoming compliant with world recognised accessibility standards.
Why are you making these changes?
We’re paving the way for a much larger redesign project which is coming down the pipe. The project will take in a UX assessment, a rebrand, a site redesign, and much more. These two upgrades are necessary to accommodate the outputs of that project.
If you have any questions, or would like to know more, leave a comment here.
