We often make technical changes to the site. Most things are small subtle changes that most people do not notice. Some even not noticeable for others than the admins. Other times we make bigger changes that are easily spotted. This weekend we made a change that I guess is somewhere in between.
The scrolling of the films on the front page has bothered me since we launched. The scroll bar has been visible, and you actually had to scroll using the scroll bar. To make it worse, you could scroll to a position where the cover to the far left was just partly shown. On top of that, there was an issue with scrolling in Firefox that meant you could never really scroll all the way back. You always ended up in the middle of the first cover. Now finally, after three months in the public, the scrolling has been addressed.
When now you go to the front page, the page of a tag or the page of a distributor, you will no longer see a scroll bar. If you on a computer move the pointer to a row of you will see an arrow on the far right. If you click on this, the row will scroll one length, and it will align perfectly on the first cover. An arrow for scrolling the other way will show up as soon as it is possible to scroll that way. This scrolling pattern follows the design of most larger web sites, and finally we have a sane design for this too 🙂 There is an unresolved issue with scrolling for mobile phones, though, as it is common to always make sure you show a small piece of the next tile to give a hint that there is more to see. On many phones now, you will see two covers, and you get no hint that there is more and possible to scroll which is not a good design. I will look into that as soon as I can.
Changes like this might look small, and maybe they are for professional front end programmers. But for me, being a back end programmer, it took several hours making a change like this. In the end, however, I think it will make the site better, and it is worth taking small breaks from adding films and covers to do improvements like that.
I hope you like the new scrolling as much as I do 🙂
Eivind