Over the last three days we’ve been steadily rolling out a new Tuts+ theme across all 8 sites. The new design is a refinement more than a big change, with lots of little improvements in usability and more suited to big screens. Read on to learn more about the redesign and lots of news about Plus!
1 The Plus Project
As you may know we have some pretty big plans for these Tuts+ sites. While today they are humble little tutorial blogs, we’ve thought for some time that it would be cool to build an entire platform for education. We’re going to call that platform Plus. You’ll know Plus content as our premium content, but no longer.
Our premium content is now ‘Premium’ (go figure!) and Plus is the brand for the educational platform we’re building, which, just like Psdtuts+, will be completely free for the most part.
With Tuts+ well established now, we’ve finally begun work on the project! We’ve acquired the domain Plus.org which will be the home of the new platform (yay for our first four letter domain!) We’ve also brought over our resident code genius Ryan Allen (who built our ActiveDen platform all by himself back in 2006) to team up with Tuts+ developer extraordinaire Fred Wu and kick ass front-end guru Derek Herman. And Skellie and I have been busy spec’ing out the plans for the new site, and it’s pretty, damn cool if I do say so myself!
Right now the Tuts+ sites are fairly passive, but we’d like to get the whole community involved in writing, teaching, answering questions and generally learning. The new Plus.org platform promises to incorporate all that plus some nifty ideas we’ve taken from gaming to come together into a social education platform.
It’s going to take a long time and we’re going to roll it all out in pieces over the next 2 years. We’re super excited about it all, and I hope I’ll have more updates in the coming months!
2 Creative Sessions and Mobiletuts+
While Plus.org will take a long time, we do have some new goodies coming much sooner including Creative Sessions which is being built now, and also Mobiletuts+ which will be all about mobile development!
3 Server Update
About a week and a half ago we had some major problems with our servers. I’m happy to say that we’ve now completely resolved these issues by moving hosts and reengineering our hosting setup completely from scratch. The new setup is much quicker and has a much greater capacity for growth, so fingers crossed, that will be the last server outage for a long time to come!
4 The Redesign
The new theme has a few neat features you may want to check out including:
- Basix!
While Tuts+ has always been known for intermediate to advanced level content, we’ve been thinking it’d be good to separate out tutorials and articles better suited to people just getting started. So we’ve created the Basix tag for quick browsing. You’ll find it in the top menu, and expect to see more Basix content soon as we beef up our library of novice-friendly content. - Easy access to Videos, Tips and Premium Posts
We’ve also started tagging videos, tips and Premium membership posts so that along with Basix content you can quickly find what you’re after. We’re generally going to be working to clean up our category/tagging across the network in the coming months to get it more standardized. - Tutorial Details on Posts
We’re also going to start standardizing all tutorials to have a "Tutorial Details" section at the top with difficulty and other pertinent details. Eventually we’ll get all the archives updated … but with over 2000 tutorials, that will take a while! - Bigger, more readable content area
We’ve expanded the site to be optimized for bigger 1280px wide screens, with a bit of JavaScript to resize for smaller resolutions. This has given us the space to clean up the content area to be a bit bigger and more readable generally. - Latest Creattica content for inspiration
We’ve also started porting over the latest Creattica content into our sidebars. There’s actually a redesign of Creattica coming in the next few weeks and we’ll be expanding the gallery to cover even more types of inspiration. The new sidebar widget will give even more exposure to those talented creatives on Creattica! - General UI Improvements
Most of the improvements on the new design are small, subtle improvements such as a reduction in the number of clicks needed to browse categories, a clearer search field, faster loading pages and generally cleaner, more optimized code.
One change that we have also made is to remove the community link feed. Over the years this was a great way to get exposure to community links, but unfortunately was also home to a lot of spam. So with this iteration we’ve left it behind.
Also at the moment sites with Flickr groups don’t have it showing, but don’t worry that’ll be back. There’s just a problem with our Flickr plugin at the moment!!
There are still some more tweaks to do to the new design and a lot of post formatting to do to get our archives matching up with the new theme. But for all intents and purposes the new theme is now alive and well! Enjoy!
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When will the Tuts (now Plus) website family stop messing with their own site and start putting some content up. I’m a paid subscriber and there have been fewer articles since the beginning of the year than there was in the first 3 months of the website’s existence.
Add to that that right now none of the articles are useful as no images are loading. I’m getting tired of the poor management of the Tuts sites.
I totally agree..I recently unsubscribed because of it :/ I really loved how well kept this site used to be and looked forward to a new tutorial daily. Come back tuts, I miss you.
Tutplus.com is one of my favorites sites. I Like the new layout, especially that it has more space to read. Agree with Flow, it seems so slow now. Hope you improve that and maintain the quality of the tuts and plustuts! Looking forward to to see plus.org, seems to be a great idea! Cheers from Argentina.
Hey guys,
We seem to be having a problem with our Content Delivery Network not delivering images and/or CSS for people in some places. Talk about bad timing!
Anyhow the devs are trying some fixes, hopefully the problems won’t last too long and then you will see the *actual* redesign, not the super unstyled page
Thanks for your patience!
Lol, it won’t work on ie. If you use firefox it should work. And trybto refresh the page.
Hi, nice news. But I have two questions hmmm, where is thumbnails of flickr insp. images? I miss it. And links with some tips, tuts etc.?
This looks great guys! Love the new design. And the premium filter… wow!
wow. this is awesome. i’ve been waiting for this. you’re one hell of a web designer. Thanks to every plus team and colis of course for making our life easier!
I really like the redesign. Thank you for making the search box clearer! I do have a suggestion for links within tutorials to be clearer – maybe with some underlining?
Thanks for all your efforts. I can’t wait for the community education portal.
I appreciate the new layout of the site because it actually fills my screen up a bit more! (got a 24″ monitor running 1920×1080)
Would really like to see the old chunky footer back again as the footer now looks a bit strange floating at the bottom. It feels more grounded having the dark footer beneath the text.
The ‘retweet’ (is that what it says?) is pretty unreadable on my screen, however I’m willing to accept that it could just be because I haven’t got around to calibrating my monitor yet
Other than that, I think the titles could be reduced in size a smidge to allow for a little more info to be displayed on the screen at any given time. I now see only 2 articles per ‘screen’ instead of say 2 1/2 or whatever it was previously. At the risk of sounding lazy, I will say that scrolling is a little lame
However, I love the general layout. Looks fabulous on my widescreen monitor so I’m a big fan!
I like the redesign except for one major detail. The info and articles that used to reside in the sidebar is now gone. Sometimes this was actually the best place to get info on your site and now it has disappeared. Hope you’ll fix this as well.
Just want to say that the tutsplus webpages work for me again now. No more strange CSS failures on the pages.
Love the re-design and tutsplus tutorials
Am I the only one who thinks they preferred the old ones? :-/
Just wanted to say that the REPLY button in the comment section is a little bit blurry in Firefox.
But it looks fine in IE 7.
And I think this button should be better at the right side of the comment box. Because you finish the reading and immediatly see the button.
I liked the redesign too, but please, stop with the icontuts! =P
Congrats, envato!
The site is working perfectly for me now!
Finally u guys went to slicehost! Amen! They’ve got really cool services and support. Also happy for the 1280 layout few people saw that more than 76% of the users have a greater than 1280 resolution.
In your case 1090 which is the approximate equivalent to 1280 as 960 is to 1024.
Overall, nice update, it’s a pleasure once again to read stuff here.
It is one of those designs, which conversion you can not immediately perceive (as a “normal” user). These are the best re-designs! Congratulations! Unfortunately the pictures sometimes are very very veeery slow » s3 cdn plus.
This new site, or maybe the host, is a dog… sooo slooow
I like new Tuts design and new features, except that layout is now optimized for wide screens. It’s harder to find and read information as it’s wider. Also everything is very big now and sometimes it looks a little messy..
But actually I love Basix, Premium, Videos, Tutorial details and all website navigation. I think new design have pros and cons, but good job, guys!
Awesome redesign, love the clean layout and the fact that you kept true to the brand even though so much has changed, congrats
I really like the redesign, and I like to see you guys having more success with your tuts network. Keep it up
I love this re-design, clean and wide, just how I like it… congratulations Envato!
Wow, that too change much.
MobileTuts!
I love Tuts+ design.
Also paged comments, nice. Great job. Looks and feels great.
yess
I totally agree..I recently unsubscribed because of it :/ I really loved how well kept this site used to be and looked forward to a new tutorial daily. Come back tuts, I miss you.
Awsome!!
Big Font meet Line based design… I like it
I m a new user. ı like them.