If you haven't read our previous blogpost about the demo toolbars yet, you should take a look at the Demo toolbars - overview and tips to improve yours. It will give you an insight on the ongoing trends and deliberations on improving our demo toolbar.
Important changes we tried to incorporate in our new demo toolbar :
- Reverse listing pattern : Earlier we had template name with rollover thumbnail, now its thumbnails with rollover template info.
- User-friendly filters : Easy to filter based on categories, years or tags.
- RESPONSIVE : It had to be responsive.
Keeping the intro short, let me walk you through the upcoming demo toolbar :
Screenshot - JoomlArt New Demo Toolbar
WHAT'S NEW?
1. Template Showcase
No more template name list to read through, treat your eyes with template thumbnails with option to feature the latest release. Selection will be much easier now for users as we present them wide range of template images in one go.
Now its click to activate toolbar dropdown, hover action has been done away with.
The Old vs. New Toolbar
The demo window shows a 5 x 3 grid view on (on desktop) and 4 x 2 or 3 x 3 grid view (on tablet) (please see the images below for more details). The featured template will be highlighted with a larger image.
Featured template
Desktop Viewport 5 x 3 grid view
Desktop Viewport 4 x 2 grid view
Tablet Viewport 3 x 3 grid view
Product categories are displayed with product or Platform icons at the top of the demo toolbar. Each template item gets a little jazzed up with the template’s download counter and its rating upon hovering, highlighting the popularity of the template / theme in the community.
Icon, Download counter & Rating features
2. Smart Filter/Categories system
We have MORE than 100+ templates for Joomla template club. This can be annoying to browse through all of the templates until you find the correct template you want. With proper tagging you can sort, filter pretty quickly through our templates. Time is money ;)
Here are our default tags:
- Year tag (2012, 2011, 2010, etc...)
Year Tag
- Templates’ feature tag (responsive, K2, business, e-commerce etc...)
Feature tag
3. Responsive web design
Yes, the toolbar is RESPONSIVE! It fits onto multiple screen-size: from your desktop to your iPad.
Responsive Demo Toolbar
4. Improved site loading time
Time is precious and wasting every single second on the site loading time do affect our customer's patience and our page ranking as well. The new version of the demo toolbar has significantly improved site loading time to nearly 2.5 times faster at Fully Loaded mode on First View and 3 times faster at Fully Loaded mode on Repeat View.
Web page performance test results from Webpagetest.org
What do you think about our new Demo Toolbar
Leave your comments below and also get ready for the next blog post as we’re going to reveal how YOU can make your own demo toolbar based on our foundation. Yes, we will share it with you all!