When asking AUEers for opinions regarding what is now the current layout of the pages on this site, which I then called the "new look", I wrote an explanation of the design. Here it is, slightly edited to cope with subsequent changes:
The title
The page title is in a large sans-serif font on an orange background that extends the whole width of the page. (Not if you're using a non-graphical browser such as Lynx, of course.)
The side navigation panel
On the left of the page is a orange navigation panel that extends the whole length of the page. You won't see the navigation panel if your browser is not executing JavaScript, either because it can't or because it's been configured not to.
The side panel provides quick access to key areas of the aue site. At the top of the panel is a small aue logo with the caption alt-usage-english.org below. Then there's a series of cream "buttons" containing links. At the bottom of the panel is a brown "quick search" area, which searches just like the "Multi-Site Search" page.
The bottom navigation bar
At the bottom of the page is a further orange navigation bar that extends the whole width of the page. Again, you won't see it without JavaScript.
The bar is mainly useful when you reach the bottom of a long page, and the links on the left navigation bar have scrolled off the top of the screen. It provides a quick return to the top of the page, and direct access to the home page of this site and the yaelf site.
The page text
With big screens or small fonts, lines of text can easily get too long for comfortable reading. So I've limited the line length to about 120 characters. If you've a large screen you should see margins either side of the text, but if you've a small screen (or a small window on large screen) the text should fill the space available. It's possible to experiment by varying the size of your window or varying the size of the fonts that your browser uses. Older browsers might not be capable of limiting the line length, so you might see no margins, regardless of window and font sizes.
A sample display
In case the above explanation isn't good enough, or doesn't seem to match what you see on your screen, I've prepared a couple of images of the way this page (actually a draft of it) looks on my PC, for reference. It's displayed using Internet Explorer 5.50 in a 1024x768 window. There are images of the top of the page and the bottom of the page (go "back" in your browser to return here when done).
No JavaScript?
As mentioned above, the navigation bars won't be visible if your browser can't run JavaScript, or if your browser settings prevent it from doing so. Especially for you, there's the Site Links page, which contains just the navigation links and nothing else. There are links to this Site Links page at the top and bottom of every page, and a message describing it at the top of the home page. If you have JavaScript, you won't see any of this.
