October 30, 2006
Good Morning, Gothamist Redesign
Welcome to a redesigned Gothamist. We've moved to a two-column layout with a cleaner layout. We hope you like it - you should be able to still find the features and sections in the left column. Be sure to refresh your cache and get the most updated CSS (Control-F5 on Windows or refresh/Apple-R on Macs).
We look forward to your feedback as well. Please comment here or email us at info(at)gothamist(dot)com.
And many thanks to Neil Epstein for his hard work.
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I for one, welcome the continuance of 7th grade spelling mistakes.
Touche.
But let's keep the comments here related to the redesign, please.
And one more thing to keep in mind, some old posts may look funky in the new two-column site. We're trying to make adjustments, but that might not be possible. So, to clarify, we'd appreciate feedback on design/user interface issues we can act on.
Apple-F5 on a Mac turns on voice-over. It's for the vision impaired. You don't really want to turn that on.
Thanks, Bill. As you can tell, I do not use Macs.
So that’s the reason for the funky comment posting recently...
Looks good.
i feel like i have to tilt my head to read it now. that's odd.
well..to be honest...
here comes the design snob in me..
I am not a fan of the blue..maybe you could try this blue instead.."006699" or try this site
http://typetester.maratz.com/
I like to resize my page so I don't have to see the ads..but now I have no choice...it does look alot cleaner though..
the photo feature is more prominent..so that satisfies the non-reader..
In Firefox 2.0 in Windows there is a scroll bar at the bottom of the page at 1024x768 with the browser maximized. This is terribly annoying and terrible unprofessional.
This also occurs at the same resolution with IE7 (Windows XP). There are also multiple JavaScript and CSS errors on the new page (have your developer check out the Error Console in Firefox).
Excellent example of allowing form to follow function--as it should. Glad to see Gothamist stick to that mantra and use it effectively. Very nice job, people!
Looks very Gawkerish. But good. I was just thinking the other day -- "I wonder if they'll redesign the site soon?". Weird.
One comment, though -- I'd think about reducing the size of your logo or at least moving it over to left:10px, because right now part of it is on top of the adsense banner.
Same as Jeff, I see the Gothamist logo overlap the ad banner. Using firefox 1.5x, on 1280x1024. Otherwise it looks nice and clean.
reading the site using firefox on a mac and the line length is entirely too long. my eyes get tired half way through reading a single line. just because you expand the layout to 1024 pixels wide doesn not mean that you need to use most of it for text.
also it annoys me that i now have to scroll down to see the gothamist labs features. i must say that draws me in more than the stories lately.
2 cents.
Everyone seems to be going with these pale blues and whites these days - it looks like a generic windows screen (at least in my default WinXP settings.) (Overheard just did it, too.)
Personally, I like websites to be, like, big blocks of color which make it seem like I'm reading something different than the usual crap on my desktop. It makes it look like somebody designed every square inch. (I guess, ultimately, I am old school.)
Also, while I'm at it, I do not like the "advertisement" blocks that flow with the text (and usually contain flickr photos, for some reason).
7: Not sure where you are getting blue from, what is your monitor resolution set to, things should be gray and not in the websafe space.
8: I tested this on IE 6 and Firefox PC, but I will again check these pages. I do see the horizontal bar issue you are talking abut and will work to fix that today
10: It's not sitting on the adsense banner for us over here. Can you give us more feedback on your browser setup so we can properly troubleshoot?
Hmm.... the code has "class"-itis and the base.css file could be 10 times lighter than it is. Good attempt, but I'd revisit the code, especially given the simplicity of the design.
12: If you are on Firefox or Safari, you should be able to make the width of your page smaller and the content column will reflow to fit the page. It's not working in IE right now, the column will remain fixed, but we are working on it.
i think the logo crashing into the ad banner is because they have the old logo cached.
looks very nice, but after refreshing, still getting a funky error at the top (mixing of the gothamist logo with the chicagoist logo). also, i posted something in the forums last night around 8 pm and it was up for hours, but now appears to be gone...
Wow, big downgrade.
You've lost "your image"--substituted it with something quite substandard, worse than a default, generic layout.
It looks horrendous and unprofessional with Firefox, Safari and Mozilla on a Mac. The width is entirely too long, the color palette is bland and indistinct, the ratio photo-text is off, and the overall look is just undercooked, lame.
If you want to play "conservative", then you probably shouldn't pretend to be "evolving" by redesigning.
Blegh.
hmm... the code is suffering a bit from "class-itis" and base.css is a bit heavy in the amount of code. For this simple of a design, it could be tightened up greatly. Good effort though. I'd see if your weather vendor has a feed that in table output.
It takes a little getting used to, but it is neater.
i don't like it, looks kinda corporate sleek, rest in peace ol' gothamist
my evil coworker set the browser to show links as blue...time for lockdown on this thing.
we appreciate the work you have done so far..
this might give you a laugh today..
Everyone thinks they can design
this new one seems kind of sterile and boring compared to the old one.
Just upgraded to FF 2.0 and the overlap seems to be fixed. Looks fine on IE 6.0.x too.
I'm kind of in agreement with MASANDE. I wish the text blocks were shorter horizontally. Maybe you guys can organize the space on the right a bit better than before instead of banishing the labs features to the bottom of the page.
I like it, my only complaint is the ALL CAPS POSTED BY: WHOEVER ON OCTOBER 30, 2006.
Much better.
go back to the old design and get a proofreader. seriously though; i'm not just trying to heckle.
Dig it! Cleaner, sleeker... it's like the Star Jones diet for Gothamist. However, I too am working to overcome the head-tilt mentioned by a poster above. Funny how the lack of ads on the right throw off my equilibrium.
im all for change but sometimes change isn't so good. i like the ol' gothamist. and i hate the arial type. i also agree w/ #6, i feel like i have to tilt instead of reading centered.
I miss the old design! The new one looks so generic, as though it were a default template! And I feel like I'm perceiving it as more cluttered for some reason (even though it's technically LESS cluttered). I also think the wider column makes it harder to read - it does great justice to the photos, but makes it harder to pay attention to the text (common problem with too-wide text columns). I'm definitely skimming more.
(This as-you-type comment preview is pretty spiffy, though!)
What has happend here? Can you go back? that's it, I will awake on Tuesday to the Gothamist that I know.
looks clean and easier to read.
going to implement this ist-wide?
I'm not a fan of the re-design. It requires me to scroll left to right as well as up and down.
totally w/ #34. scrolling up/down is one thing but now left/right?
thanks for the comment, neil. i can resize my window and the line length shrinks but i am left with a scroll bar and some blank columnal space on the right. i'm not sure that is what is meant by relative sizing. a fixed width layout and relative sized elements within it simply makes no sense.
1) The all-caps comment "posted by" info is terrible looking. It's not good form to do all-caps in small sizes.
2) The all-Arial-all-the-time is totally nasty. Headlines should be in a different font.
3) The ads on the left do seem better, it makes the page feel less crowded.
4) The most recommended/most commented info at the top is nice, but the font there is too small.
5) I don't remember the old site being very colorful, but the new site looks totally drab and concrete-ish. And I don't mean concrete in a delicious, Shake Shack way.
6) It might be best to go back to the old site and have a version of the site available for testing, similar to what Slashdot does from time to time. You can get feedback when you're mostly done and before you launch, instead of surprising everyone in a kind of "ugh, what did they do?" way.
D'oh! These are probably not valid design critiques, but I mostly read Gothamist at work and to be discreet I keep the window small- so this scrolling to the left is really a drag. Also the pictures are HUGE, which I don't feel adds much to the experience. Make the articles look less important too (or shorter). Anyway, my 2 cents. :(
Hate hate hate the all caps in the "posted by" area.
Additionally, the line length is far too long. Especially with something like news, you want to keep the columns more narrow so that people can scan them more easily.
Also hate hate hate the grey background. Makes me feel like it's raining out.
The logo is running into the ad.
I feel like my eye skips completely over the "most commented" and "most recommended." They don't stand out at all, and they are usually what I click on first.
My 2, 3 and 4 cents.
I miss the old design, too. Why fix what isn't broken? Maybe this one will grow on me.....
We're reading everyone's comments, there have been quite a few valid ones and we'll try to incoporate them as we continue to evolve the site. So thank you very much for your constructive feedback.
And remember to refresh your browser - that should improve the logo situation, Mel.
I also really dislike the arial font because it makes it look less professional and more generic personal-blog-esque.
And having to scroll side to side is annoying. I liked the shorter column length of the old site.
But redesign is good sometimes, and if this is how it's going to be, I guess I'll live.
not into it. go back.
I definitely agree that this is a step backward. Gothamist was perfectly fine before. This design looks like some simple default template in Frontpage.
Why not move the ads to a third column on the right, so that the Contribute section is still visible at the top of the page? I think it's a mistake not to have that section at the top. Otherwise, like the larger photos/illustrations.
miss the old layout, felt more newspaperish to me. Takes some getting used too ( yep! I guess I'm a pureist.)
The comments area is not fully working. I submit a comment and I get an error, so I re-write my comment and then I get two postings.
I have to say that I'm in the "I liked the old layout better" camp.
First, Arial is bad.
Second, the articles no longer feel like self-contained stories. The overly-long lines (big problem) trail off into dead white space on the right, and the weak <hr /> tags make for a weak top and bottom boundary. The extra-large images only make this worse, by pushing the text into a secondary role.
Third, regarding the new logo format. (The old was initially cached and overrunning the ad header in my browser as well. Plus, isn't it a little odd to run a Chicagoist ad in what could very well pass for the title space on Gothamist?) The skyline loses something of its subtlety in the new square block format. I'm dead-set against it, but for the moment, I think its too clunky. Which also goes for the all-caps taglines.
Wow. what the why??? it looks horrible - like you went from a great newsy web design to an 8th grade blog style. wait, that's exactly what you did.
and agreed, line length is idiostupidly long. change it back, change it back! before i ... oh, nuthin'.. i'm still gonna read it every day. i guess i'll just pine for the days when the design didn't suck.
good try though..
wait. no. no it wasn't.
This font is very hard on the eyes. Your previous font at least had semi-serifs that one's eyes could latch on to. I feel like I'm squintintg trying to read your articles now.
I meant to say that I'm NOT dead-set against the new logo format. That it might grow on me, but I slightly dislike it.
I don't like the redesign. The add for Chicagoist at the top looks like the headline for this site -- I thought I logged onto the wrong site and actually went to a different site last night after going to Gothamist b/c I thought the site was messed up.
If you are stuck on keeping the new design, I suggest making some sort of border on the right of the posts to maintain balance (like a darker color, similar to the ad background on the left). And also, I'd recommend not allowing the picture to get too big, if people want to look at them, they can follow the link.
This site looks like gothamist 1.0, as where the previous was 2.0. The white backgrounds were good, these new colors are more dreary and gloomy. The colors give the impression of a cloudy day, and coming to a "cloudy" website isn't cool.
hey jen.. i'm digging it. The line length is a little long, but I think all you really need is a border on the right side or something.. something to add a little finality to each line.. or each post in a different shade of grey. You guys do good work... keep it up.
I like it. Change is good.
http://web2.0validator.com/
to funny..
The new design SUCKS. Put the old design back
I for one like it, including (shockingly) the use of Arial. Based on my involvement with other sites that have undergone redesigns, keep in mind people are generally resistant to change. ;-) Great work, and I'm looking forward to how it looks as you tweak it over the next few days/weeks.
I do agree with #53, though; the right side of the posts/comments columns feels like it's floating off into space. Some subtle hinting there may be useful, e.g., change the shading of the post/comment boxes so that there's a good contrast against the background).
I for one like it, including (shockingly) the use of Arial. Based on my involvement with other sites that have undergone redesigns, keep in mind people are generally resistant to change. ;-) Great work, and I'm looking forward to how it looks as you tweak it over the next few days/weeks.
I do agree with #53, though; the right side of the posts/comments columns feels like it's floating off into space. Some subtle hinting there may be useful, e.g., change the shading of the post/comment boxes so that there's a good contrast against the background).
Seriously, the ad at the top looks like the page banner, and I thought I went to Chicagoist by mistake.
Not a fan. Please bring the old layout back. Don't mess with your branding!
Not a rant - hopefully to be taken as constructive feedback:
1. Ditto on the "is this chicagoist" comment. Exactly my first reaction.
2. Arial (black) on grey (which appears to default to 10pt) is harder to read than the previous white on black.
3. Layout is not cleaner, on the other hand: pictures of varying sizes strewn on the page make it look vastly more unkempt.
4. Not a fan of having to scroll right and left.
5. The misspellings I have come to love. It's part of your brand. But this supposedly "slicker" look and feel is somehow not Gothamist. It's very half-baked, and very off-putting.
Images are forcing the text to go very wide, much wider than I like to have my windows, and resizing the window moves everything up and down to match the new width. Very annoying.
Perhaps you could put a maximum width on text boxes and images?
I kinda hate it.
8: the glitch with the 1024x768 screens having a horizontal bar should be resolved. as should be the javascript error in IE and most the FF CSS errors should be clear. Any remaining ones are for IE support.
thanks for your constructive coments and bug catching. please keep them coming.
the site was already pretty clean; this is fine as far as sleekness is concerned.
the nice thing about the white background breakdowns for content in the layout before was that they helped the readability. using alternating colors in the background, like this page does for each different thread, for example, would be a pretty easy change to make and organize the articles better. the headlines also looked clearer as a result of the difference in background colors.
however, so long as gothamist doesn't go pink or became foofy, i think i can adapt.
Nice, clean, less cluttered. Well done, keep it up.
I don't think enough has been said about the clumsiness of the redesigned gothamist logo in the top left corner. As a single line a la the chicagoist logo conveniently loated front-and-center, the skyline looks more like in-line symb