I know you said that as respectfully as possible. Right now, non-members of PK's Layout Team could only choose among two skins in the skin menu. (FYI to other readers, the Layout Credits box's
more info link shows where to look for the skin menu.)
I understand your concern but IMO that's a small inconvenience compared to what we're trying to achieve here. But first, lemme say that
our newer skins now make use of many changes we've done with "Higher", so you'd all see less obvious tweaking when we display them. I'm planning a monthly rotation of default skins.
The "Higher" layout had so many obvious edits because it's the first PK one to use a vastly different template since 2007 (or perhaps earlier). This year, I've set the ff guidelines for PK forum layouts:
-- Make the banners wider and taller to show more of the drawings. I asked our artists to show our beloved couples' full heads and to show them hugging / kissing / touching;
-- After initially compressing some illustrations into horizontal banners, we decided that they'd be much better shown as vertical banners;
-- The headers should clearly state that Portkey's main ship is H/H.
Because of all that, we've tweaked the "Higher" skin plenty before and since it went live. I don't regret showing it early because had I done it later, then Maeve might not have seen it and I wouldn't have known about her talent for making banners (see our convo on this thread). If she had seen it later, she might have been too busy to join our "make new skins" project. Steph and I have been learning a lot from her and Gilly. Our learning curve went up very steeply with the Higher layout; I myself learned more Photoshop, CSS and HTML techniques in the month we've worked on Higher than at at any other point in my life.
Another reason for Higher's many obvious edits was that I was using Vista and Firefox much of the time. IE 7's shortcomings are legendary, although some of those have been fixed with IE 8. One day I briefly used my XP computer and discovered that Vista was showing noticeably different colors, ie, gray as blue or green, light blue as intense green, medium blue as dark gray-blue. etc. That's why we've since been looking for colors that would look okay in both XP and Vista. Testing them takes a lot of time.
About the text on the margin/s, that's for the benefit of people who wonder why H/H fans outnumber anyone else here. As for the FAQs box, I've explained that
here.
Now about reviving 2004-era skins, it's because I group PK visitors into the following categories (not mutually exclusive):
a. those who visit PK regularly;
b. those who don't necessarily ship H/H but adore one of our side-ships;
c. those who haven't been in PK in ages -- months or years;
d. those who've seen PK in its pre-HBP days.
I've got groups b and d in mind in displaying the 2004-era skins in certain forums (welcome back, shippy art/media forums, shippy movie forum). These old skins would show up regardless of PK-ers' choice in the skin menu. These 2004 layouts bring back plenty of PK memories from a time when our members were arguably at their most optimistic about their respective PK ships. We've added plenty of side-ship logos for our "alternating logos" layout. There's also a story behind many of those drawings as the fandom very nearly lost them. We'd tell the whole story soon.
I suppose people wonder why couldn't we have kept each skin hidden until we've perfected it? In my 4-year experience mod-ing in PK, that's not the best approach. Even pros like Google keep many products on beta mode for months or years.
A lab's way less conducive than a live environment for spurring ideas.
Besides, if we make volunteers wait too long, we risk killing their momentum and enthusiasm. I hadn't expected our graphic editors to deliver so quickly; but when they said they did have a small window of time to make these graphics, I grabbed that opportunity. I think that the best way to thank them would be to display their work as soon as possible.
Steph churned out 3-4 graphics within hours of me PM'ing her to make some, despite her being in the middle of a big family event. Gilly always tries to squeeze in PK graphic editing while working on her thesis, attending dance classes and working on her other RL projects.
Maeve's made more than a dozen graphics already (she showed me 8 today) though I don't want her to be spending much of her school break on this project -- or on anything PK for that matter. There's also the other factor that Sue and I (PK's current layout "techs") might be too busy later with other PK projects or with RL.
In sum, I acknowledge that our current approach causes some inconveniences, but the end results are usually worth it. It's no mean feat to get volunteers from all over the world to work on projects like this and to juggle several projects.
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