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#345509 - 03/06/2011 10:56 How to instantly lose site visitors with a redesign
hybrid8 carpal tunnel Registered: 12/11/2001 Posts: 7738 Loc: Toronto, CANADA	Start with a desire to redesign for nothing but the sake of redesign. Don't worry about solving any issues with the existing design. Continue with design input from non-designers and with people using only a specific device to access your site. Don't worry at all about accessibility or the ease of accessing the site from different devices with different screens (or no screens). Take elements from one of the most publicized redesigns-gone-wrong of the past few years (Gawker) and incorporate them in a slightly different way. And here we have a new The Unofficial Apple Weblog Is content still king on the web? Yes, sure it is. But without accessible design no one is going to bother with that content. I've already stopped visiting the site, based solely on its redesign and I won't return. I did send them feedback mentioning a number of their pitfalls. What I don't understand is why they didn't base their new site off their sister site, Engadget? Edited by hybrid8 (03/06/2011 10:58) _________________________ Bruno Twisted Melon : Fine Mac OS Software
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#345518 - 03/06/2011 16:18 Re: How to instantly lose site visitors with a redesign [Re: hybrid8]
siberia37 old hand Registered: 09/01/2002 Posts: 702 Loc: Tacoma,WA	It looks like an example site for a bad Content Management System- or an inflexible one where everything has to look the same and fit it's template.
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#345519 - 03/06/2011 16:42 Re: How to instantly lose site visitors with a redesign [Re: siberia37]
hybrid8 carpal tunnel Registered: 12/11/2001 Posts: 7738 Loc: Toronto, CANADA	That's a very apt and succinct description. Besides being bland, everything is just so small and pigeon-holed. Even if I wanted to, I just could not bring myself to frequent that site design. It's like they've removed the content from what should be a content-driven site. It's nothing but a list, or optionally a grid, of headlines or thumbnails respectively. Useless. _________________________ Bruno Twisted Melon : Fine Mac OS Software
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#345522 - 03/06/2011 18:17 Re: How to instantly lose site visitors with a redesign [Re: hybrid8]
tonyc carpal tunnel Registered: 27/06/1999 Posts: 7058 Loc: Pittsburgh, PA	Yet another reason why I basically use RSS exclusively to browse articles, and only pull up the article on the web site if the RSS feed has stripped / truncated content. I don't think I've browsed the front page of a website that has a working RSS feed in a long time. _________________________ - Tony C my empeg stuff
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#345524 - 03/06/2011 18:42 Re: How to instantly lose site visitors with a redesign [Re: tonyc]
drakino carpal tunnel Registered: 08/06/1999 Posts: 7868	It's all about the click game. How many clicks can you get out of your freeloaders (ie regular visitors) to help drive ad revenue up? The old way was a home page with 3 or 4 articles and then a next button. Now their method seems to be small snippets from articles, with more listed on one page, but more clicks if people are interested in any stories. I am moving more towards Tony's camp though. RSS never really worked well for me until the iPad and Flipboard. Now I'm using Google Reader to power it, and have also reduced the number of sites I pull info from. Initially I plugged in all the sites I regularly visited, and it was just dupe city. Now I'm down to just a few sites, mostly with content that is more journalistic in nature, instead of the quick blog style.
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#345525 - 03/06/2011 18:51 Re: How to instantly lose site visitors with a redesign [Re: drakino]
Robotic pooh-bah Registered: 06/04/2005 Posts: 2026 Loc: Seattle transplant	Originally Posted By: drakino Now I'm down to just a few sites, mostly with content that is more journalistic in nature, instead of the quick blog style. Now I'm curious what your list of revered sites is... _________________________ 10101311 (20GB- backup empeg) 10101466 (2x60GB, Eutronix/GreenLights Blue) (Stolen!)
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#345526 - 03/06/2011 19:06 Re: How to instantly lose site visitors with a redesign [Re: Robotic]
hybrid8 carpal tunnel Registered: 12/11/2001 Posts: 7738 Loc: Toronto, CANADA	I'm trying to simply eliminate visiting blog sites, so in fact TUAW did me a favor. _________________________ Bruno Twisted Melon : Fine Mac OS Software
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#345528 - 03/06/2011 19:34 Re: How to instantly lose site visitors with a redesign [Re: Robotic]
drakino carpal tunnel Registered: 08/06/1999 Posts: 7868	These are my current tech news sites: thisismynext.com - quickly becoming my favorite. Instead of just posting very quick snippets of news with the exact same content everyone else is posting, they tend to also do deeper analysis. For example, there was these two articles earlier in the week: News - HTC will no longer lock bootloaders Editorial - HTC’s bootloader decision: what does it mean? If it's something that interests me, I have a well researched editorial piece right there to help me learn more. arstechnica.com - I've been an infrequent visitor over the years. Once I had my Flipboard/Google Reader setup, I found I was looking at more and more of their stories, to the point they rose up and survived my culling last week. anandtech.com - Always been a big fan of the reviews there. Their approach seems to not only be to provide good reviews, but also provide in depth technical explanations that are still easy enough to follow. daringfireball.net - Hey, it's required as part of the official Apple fanboy club deal :-) I'm still deciding on sites for gaming news, car news, and a few of my other interests. Last week, I purged the following from my feeds: engadget.com slashdot.org tuaw.com (not because of the redesign) macrumors.com I think I had some others that I dropped too, but now I can't remember what they were. Gawkers been on my bad list for a while, so they were never a part of my Google Reader setup.
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#345530 - 03/06/2011 20:53 Re: How to instantly lose site visitors with a redesign [Re: hybrid8]
gbeer carpal tunnel Registered: 17/12/2000 Posts: 2665 Loc: Manteca, California	There's a parallel to the way newspapers and magazines are laid out. If you want to read the articles serially, you wind up flipping back and forth, and are exposed to the ads more frequently. Magazines and newspapers have had a hard time moving into the web. So what are the odds that you are seeing blogs being morphed into online forms of those layouts. Or maybe its just the vendors of dead tree, page layout software, are moving on to new clients. _________________________ Glenn
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#345533 - 04/06/2011 00:57 Re: How to instantly lose site visitors with a redesign [Re: gbeer]
hybrid8 carpal tunnel Registered: 12/11/2001 Posts: 7738 Loc: Toronto, CANADA	I'm going to try out 9to5mac.com for Apple-related news for a little while. At least their design is bold and clean. And I'm also using GlimmerBlocker to block ads and reformat the page and some page elements making the site look even better. Only some quick CSS edits. I do something similar for other sites I visit that have bothersome amounts of dead space of out of place design elements. Edited by hybrid8 (05/06/2011 21:47) _________________________ Bruno Twisted Melon : Fine Mac OS Software
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#345554 - 06/06/2011 15:10 Re: How to instantly lose site visitors with a redesign [Re: drakino]
Robotic pooh-bah Registered: 06/04/2005 Posts: 2026 Loc: Seattle transplant	Originally Posted By: drakino These are my current tech news sites: thisismynext.com - quickly becoming my favorite. Instead of just posting very quick snippets of news with the exact same content everyone else is posting, they tend to also do deeper analysis. For example, there was these two articles earlier in the week: News - HTC will no longer lock bootloaders Editorial - HTC’s bootloader decision: what does it mean? If it's something that interests me, I have a well researched editorial piece right there to help me learn more. arstechnica.com - I've been an infrequent visitor over the years. Once I had my Flipboard/Google Reader setup, I found I was looking at more and more of their stories, to the point they rose up and survived my culling last week. anandtech.com - Always been a big fan of the reviews there. Their approach seems to not only be to provide good reviews, but also provide in depth technical explanations that are still easy enough to follow. daringfireball.net - Hey, it's required as part of the official Apple fanboy club deal :-) I'm still deciding on sites for gaming news, car news, and a few of my other interests. Last week, I purged the following from my feeds: engadget.com slashdot.org tuaw.com (not because of the redesign) macrumors.com I think I had some others that I dropped too, but now I can't remember what they were. Gawkers been on my bad list for a while, so they were never a part of my Google Reader setup. Ah, interesting! I remember finding good reviews on ananadtech a few years ago when I was shopping for high-speed thumb drives. I never caught on to reading the site regularly, though. I'll have to try it and some of the others you've listed. I'm pretty well rooted on slashdot and sister-in-spirit site Fark.com. Fark has recently updated its look and they don't seem to have broken anything. Their old motto "It's not news, it's FARK!" has been replaced with "We don't make news. We mock it." I'm still stuck on Gizmodo/Jalopnik/Lifehacker, although I use their old style pages and generally get more info from the comments than the blurbs. FlightGlobal is a great aero-industry news site. Best I've found for free. GizMag hits the same part of my brain that old Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines used to. Bright site, more coverage than just blurbs, interesting and sometimes whimsical articles. And then there's The Kneeslider- a one-man operation that mostly reports on motorcycle related news and innovations, but often goes into aspects of autos, motors, and other mechanasia (is that a word?). New posts pop up every couple of days, but are generally interesting to me. _________________________ 10101311 (20GB- backup empeg) 10101466 (2x60GB, Eutronix/GreenLights Blue) (Stolen!)
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