Recently gawker media changed the layout design of all their blogs this included 2 that I read Gizmodo and Lifehacker. I'll just tell you right now it's a horrible redesign it is as if they thought how can I make this as unreadable as possible. Before you would scroll down a single column and view the stories and is was all very easy to read and chronologically ordered. Now there is a setup like some one wants to bring tables back. You've got the main pane where the article sits or when you first open the pages multiple articles might be and on the side is a column listing the stories(with out times or dates listed) and an even smaller blurb about the story than before. One of my gripes about Gawker blogs is how shorts the blurbs were before and then you open the story and well the story was like 2 lines longer. This has actually gotten worse.
So onto the content length this has been most evident on Gizmodo, things seem to be shrinking. The amount of story has gotten shorter and shorter and some of the posts that are of any substantial length are more copy and paste from the source article. Now when it come to navigation some of the stories are from other gawker blogs to fill out the content and the shitty problem with that is that it loads that blogs UI and so when you go back to Gizmodo from Kotaku you have to find where you were before and that isn't as easy since you don't know when anything was posted. So they said this would improve browsing for the user and I didn't find it as such so I e-mailed them about it and also wanted them to know the load times were 3 times as long compared to lets say Engadget, here is the response:
"We're sorry you're unhappy with the redesign. Have you tried our "Classic" view? Visit www.site.com/classic/ (e.g. www.io9.com/classic/) for an experience more similar to the old sites. Our goal was to make the front page lighter and simpler to scan, while also emphasizing big feature stories that we've written. The fact is that we spend a lot of time creating cool, original articles for our sites, but sometimes they would get lost in that long, long blog scroll. This way, we can splash them as big as we want! And not sacrifice load time. For a more in-depth explanation for the redesign, you can read this post by Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton: http://lifehacker.com/5701749. Regards, Jimmy N. Gawker Media Help Desk "  So here is a screen grab of classic see the diference? so now you can scroll through in the bigger box too. But do it make any of the content bigger? Nope. Can you view videos with out the jump? No. Does it load faster? No. Is it actually that much different? Fuck no. And I didn't even mention that the box is less than half my screen width on my 15" mbp so that is pretty tiny. So Yes the redesign has saved me a lot fo time in fact I have spent less time on gawker sites this week than I have writing this post and as it is always obvious I don't spend much time on these. So now my solution is RSS but even that has been a pain in the ass with Gawker because you have to jump to read anything and there still isn't much to read when you get to the jump I could go on about the mislabeling of their stories but I'm not. Hey gawker take a look at Engadget they have something like 1.5 million rss followers and much higher web traffic suck it up and admit you are the new coke or the new gap logo and just friend an elegant solution to this mess of a problem. You don't have to do this to your content just to make your blog different. Oh yeah and if I hear one of your "bloggers" call them selves a journalist but don't know the difference between their and there again I'm going to scream, at least get some one to proof that shit. |
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