I'm sure many of you have already noticed the new menu bar the appears at the top of every page. I implemented the menu bar across the site at around 12:45 pm (Eastern Time) today.
I have been working on the new menu for a while, and it has become increasingly important in the last several months to get it done. The main reason is that with so much of Lottery Post usage shifting to tablets and phones, the old menu bar was not fitting properly on those screens, and the appearance of the menu bar was becoming fuzzy and difficult to read on high-resolution mobile screens.
Here are the highlights of the new menu bar:
- The old menu was based on images, which on some screens looks fine, but on modern, high-resolution screens tends to look fuzzy and less readable. The new menu uses a real custom font, which stays smooth and crisp, even on high resolution screens. In fact, on high resolution screens the menus look even better.
- On all modern web browsers (IE 10+, Google Chrome, Firefox, etc.) the new menu bar has a nice color gradient that matches the Lottery Post colors much better than the old menu, which had a sort of non-matching blue color. In old web browsers (namely, IE 9 and lower), the new menu bar has a solid blue color that matches the Lottery Post website colors.
- The new menu bar takes up less space on the screen, which makes it better for various size screens, including phones.
- The highlighted item on the menu bar is much more visible now.
- The drop-down menus are a lighter blue color that better matches the Lottery Post colors, and are more readable because they have better contrast with the text color. Also, I have reduced the amount of transparency in the menus to make them more readable.
- The old "Private Inbox" menu item is now called "Mail". I needed to save some space in the layout, so the old menu item was changed to an envelope symbol for about the past month, but now it has settled on "Mail". The menu item is changed to red color when new mail has arrived.
I have tested the new menu across a variety of devices and web browsers to be sure it works everywhere. However, it is naturally possible that I have missed a glitch someplace, so please let me know if you have any troubles with the new menu bar. Be sure to let me know what device type you're using, the operating system (and version number), and the browser type (and version number).