I do mostly like the new site, it's nice to have things be faster and more organized. I'm sure being able to actually work on it comfortably will be a big improvement for the admins as well.
I do have a couple of visual gripes - there were some aspects of the old site that I think I definitely preferred. First of all, the movie "boxes" look a lot more... bland? barren? than they did before. This is especially obvious on the main page. For comparison (old one is first, new one is second):
http://puu.sh/I89q3/a1ff98b180.png
https://puu.sh/I89pP/dd66f03522.png
I feel like if the new one had more blue and less white, it would be more visually appealing.
The other thing is that I notice the "tabs" at the top are gone, replaced with more generic looking labels. Again, for comparison (old one is first, new one is second):
https://puu.sh/I8a0A/a2decc69a5.jpg
https://puu.sh/I89Vs/154ac89341.jpg
I'm not as certain about this, but I *think* I prefer the old design (tabs) here.
In general, I just feel like the new site design is a lot more bland, white, uses more plain text in place of images, and just seems less polished. The big exception is the "newest publications" etc section on the main site, which looks very noticeably more polished, with tables instead of the bland-looking lists from the old site. Comparison (old one is first, new one is second):
https://puu.sh/I8a40/6a391bc93d.png
https://puu.sh/I8a4w/5cc2fdb1b7.png
The new one absolutely looks better here, and is easier to read on top of that.
I know this is a work in progress, so I imagine lots of stuff isn't finished yet, and that may be why it looks the way it does. It's not *bad* by any means, but it just seems less "colorful" than the old site in many places. If more of the "color" from the old site were returned, or even replaced with totally new "color", that would be a huge improvement for me.
Overall though, I appreciate the work that was put into this, and the whole reason I made an account and posted all this is because I believe in this project and want it to be as good as it can be.
