Prediction: Any and all comments criticising the new look are going to be moved to a tiny backroom thread of complaints where they can be utterly ignored by the boingboing staff who congratulate themselves on having no negative comments in the official redesign thread
9 Likes
Why are the new stories crammed down into a small column while the ancient material gets big glorious boxes? It seems backwards. I think if the columns were 70/30 split instead of 40/60 (just eyeballing this here) it would be a little easier to see which content is recent. I also would include a little extra whitespace between the columns to keep them visually separate. The features side is also pretty chaotic with some rows doubled up and others at 2/3 with and some at full width.
It seems to choose a somewhat unfortunate font as well?
6 Likes
Huh, I donât mind The Verge, but I hate the layout on Ars Technica (always switch it to linear) and Iâm not liking it here. I wonder why The Verge gets a pass from me. Or why I never even really noticed it in the first palce.
I like it. Less scrolling, and the meatier stories actually stand out and donât disappear after a few hours. I felt like on the old site, I didnât realize a post was actually a really STORY until after I clicked on it, and saw a funky page design!
I like it.
OTOH, I also pine for the days when BoingBoing homepage had QuickTopics nested inside of QuickTopicsâŚ
1 Like
âWith a renewed focus on original features comes a new homepage design, crafted toâŚâ maximize clickthroughs. Whatâs worse is that youâve finally imposed this on the RSS feed as well. Thatâs a total deal-breaker. There isnât nearly enough in RSS to know whether I want to click through or not. Which means I wonât read anything.
3 Likes
It will take a little getting used to, but itâll probably work once the mind adapts.
(But I do agree that it seems like a redesign for the sake of redesign, meaning that there was nothing wrong with the functionality of the old site, so Iâm not sure what useability issue this is trying to correct. I guess that makes sense, though: software engineers are in the business of writing software, so they always add features because thatâs what theyâre paid for. Same goes for site designers, I guessâŚ)
Edit to add: there seem to be a lot of things on the /page/1 link that arenât on the new home page. That is a mistake IMO; there arenât so many posts on the site that partitioning the content is necessary for useability. Moreover, I think that decreases the usability, so Iâd vote for making sure all posts end up on the front page.
2 Likes
The new visual layout is something Iâll get accustomed to.
One thing I wonât get accustomed to is that the front page no longer has content on it.
Instead of getting to see some of a story and decide if I want to read more, now I just get a click-baity headline and some flavor text. I half-expected all the headlines to be âOMG YOU WONâT BELIEVE THESE FIVE EASY WAYS THAT LARRY LESSIG CAN IMPROVE COPYRIGHT.â
19 Likes
Apparently I jumped the gun in my comment below. Iâm sorry about that.
1 Like
http://boingboing.net/rss should be excerpts, while Boing Boing (and all the other usual wordpress-generated feeds, which you can get by adding /feed to URLS) should be full-content. If not, it should be fixed soon.
2 Likes
i hate it but I love it. difficult, new, changey, etc, but? YAY! change is scary, out of the comfort zone, busy and different, but heck yes, shake things up (including martinis!) celebrate the new!
What will make the difference is that we wonât be using the new âmagazineâ layout in the service of that sort of relentless viralnova-style clickbait. For us, itâs to make sure that the original features we write and pay for get pride of place, but without removing the reverse-chron blog column that still remains.
Our job is to make sure that the features continue to justify the new layout. Those who prefer an unfiltered, single column can be assured weâll never stop publishing one: itâs right here.
11 Likes
Put me in the group that doesnât like the new layout. Itâs visually interesting and hard to read. I liked the old layout where the focus was more on the content and not on how the content looked. Iâll get used to it, but it will always suck.
6 Likes
The inability to read posts without clicking the teaser is a brutal change.
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Yeah! Dismiss any and all criticism as white noise whining! That way youâre always right!
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Making feature articles more prominent is not a bad thing. I also like that those features will be kept from being lost in the chronological feed. However, the new front page is visually confusing, and the switch to pictures rather than more text is much less interesting. I donât like having to click through to read what a post is about. This is particularly annoying on my phone which is how I mostly read bb. Also, once I click through to an article, the formatting looks like it is intended for a large screen. The small text canât seem to be re-sized on a phone. The redesign makes bb much less usable. This is actually a very personal tragedy. I adore bb, and this redesign makes it much harder to consume! Please at least make the older format an option for readers! I feel like Iâve lost a limb!
4 Likes
Hmm⌠I dunno if this is a bug or simply a usability issue, but I canât find the recently posted Tom the Dancing Bug on the new home page, but it does show up in the old linear format at http://boingboing.net/page/1 (where it comes just after the 25 years as boingboing post and just before the kickstarted game about terrorism post).
3 Likes
Same here. I strongly dislike this new design. Itâs just too crowded. I very much preferred the simple linear layout.
Change for the sake of change is rarely-if-ever a good idea. The old design was perfectly functional. Youâre fixing what wasnât broken.
I realize some folks might prefer the site this way, and thatâs fine for them. Perhaps you could give us a user-option for display style? Thatâd be great.
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