Information about Computer Hope redesigns

Since it was released in 1998, the Computer Hope website has had a similar look and feel. Over the years, we have made many significant changes to the site. The big update in 2010 converted the site from being table driven to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) driven while maintaining a similar look and feel.

Responsive design

With the increased popularity of e-readers, smartphones, and tablets, we felt in 2014 that the site needed to be updated with modern standards. All our help pages are updated to use HTML5, without loss of support for older browsers. Pages are now more responsive and resize for all screen resolutions and aspect ratios.

Clean and simple design

Another important part of our 2014 redesign was to make all the pages easier to read with few or no distractions. We believe we accomplished this goal by implementing the following changes.

• Centered design - All pages are now centered, so anyone with big monitors or resolutions will not have the text stretched across the screen.
• Removed blue bars - The blue bar that adorned the left side of our pages since 1998 was removed, and the top navigation was cleaned up and made less distracting. All features found on these bars were moved to either the top or bottom of the page.
• Breadcrumbs - Navigation breadcrumbs were moved from the right side of the page and added to the top of every page.
• Balloons - All menu items have balloons describing their functions.

Accessibility

We have tried to make our site accessible to all types of users, including those who use screen readers to view pages. One of the features that help screen readers is the Tab key to "Skip to Main Content" option. Screen readers can also press Enter to skip down to the content without going through the menu options.

We've also added the ability to use Alt+S as a shortcut to get to the Search.

New logo

Over the years, our logo has evolved into a more clear and understandable logo that represents the letter "C" and "H" for "Computer Hope." We wanted to keep the same concept with a more modern look, some color, and keep it as a circle. Below is how our logo has evolved.

Speed

Speed is another important consideration we kept in our minds during the redesign. Although we added more features to each of our pages, all the pages still load as fast, if not faster than the previous design.

Computer Hope font

In late 2020, we added a new Computer Hope font for our website for displaying the sprites throughout our site. This update changed the older raster version of the sprites to vector versions to help with scaling and add compatibility for the upcoming dark mode.

Dark mode

In 2021, we introduced a new dark mode that is automatically enabled if the user has dark mode enabled on their computer or device. With this update, we also updated many of our pictures to appear properly in both modes.

Other changes

We also made thousands of additional changes to the existing content and have added more new content. We hope you enjoy the changes and, as always, welcome all feedback.