You might notice that gadgetnewsonline has changed. Indeed so has the whole network. Long before the page size/speed and advertising controversies, we knew that we needed to rethink how we presented ourselves.
While we were one of the lightest and fastest sites in our field, our feature creep and advertisers were adding complexity and page load times, which is especially crucial on mobile – an ever expanding percentage of our growing audience.
We decided to start over…
You are VIPs (so we are VIP)
One thing we’ve loved for years is our hosting provider: We’re hosted on WordPress’s own top-tier VIP. That means we have tons of global redundancy and speed, the latest WordPress code free from hacks and exploits, and the smartest backend help around. VIP is the same platform and servers that Bloomberg, NFL, NBC, Time, NYPost, CNN, Quartz, Fortune and many of the world’s top websites use.
VIP obviously costs a lot of money, which is why we’re the only Apple site that puts this much of our resources into our hosting. What this buys us (and you) is:
- The fastest page loads around the world
- Outages/slowdowns almost unheard of even during huge events
- Unparalleled safety and security
VIP is worth it. You are worth it.
We’re also proud to work with 10up, who executed strategy, design, development, and ad integration for our latest iteration. We’ve been one of 10up’s earliest clients, since Jake Goldman started the agency on his own in 2011. 10up has grown to over a hundred employees, and it services the same top-tier class of clients. The fact that we’ve grown alongside 10up says a lot about both of our organizations.
What’s new? Everything (else).
We started with a clean slate and questioned everything on the site. If it wasn’t integral to the experience, it’s gone. If it’s important, we cleaned it up and made it better.
We’ve killed the tag lines on our logos. We’ve killed the right sidebar because it prevented us from doing full width imagery, media, and writing, and it wasn’t great for mobile. We’ve cleaned up search, social, tags, and category placement. Our new fonts are fresh and more readable across a wide variety of devices. The front page scrolls ‘infinitely’ with date and stock price line dividers while article pages load up relevant stories to continue to read. “Asides”, our coverage of niche stories with a one line title, now have images and will open up in-line.
The focus is on beauty and usability across all platforms. From Phone to bigscreen and everything in between. We love it and hope you do too.
Ads (ugh)
Ads are a particularly painful part of my life, and I could and probably will write a book on the what/whys/hows etc. The bottom line is that banner ads currently are a very necessary evil, but we use DoubleClick for Publishers and Ad Exchange, which are industry standards for speed, reliability, and quality.
The good news is that with the sidebar gone, there are fewer ads, and ads only appear between every two posts on the front page. Ads will only load up as you scroll. That makes the page itself quicker and uses much less data than loading up the front page full of ads right away.
More importantly, we are also experimenting with sponsored posts/native ads that clear the house ads for the day (Get in Touch!). In a perfect world, we’d do one of these a day, every day, all year.
New Site! (Electrek.co)
The news that Apple and Google are working on electric cars and building huge solar farms is recent, but we’ve been covering the “post fossil fuel” transportation industry for two years on Electrek.co (a hobby!). With new writers Fred Lambert and Jon Jivan, we’re now going full time.
[tweet https://twitter.com/llsethj/status/402446541031755776 align=’center’]
I believe we’re in the early stages of a huge transition away from fossil fuel. Coal and natural gas are being replaced by wind and solar power. We’re at a tipping point with electric cars where they are starting to cost less to use than gas (even at reduced prices). That’s before climate change action by people and governments kick in.
We’ll be documenting it all.
Expect full coverage every day of:
- Electric cars from Tesla and other automakers
- Autonomous driving
- Electric boats, planes, trains, bikes, skateboards, and any other means of transportation out there
- Wind and hydro power
- Hobby to large scale solar and sustainable living
Enjoy! (and what’s next)
As always, we very much appreciate your comments and feedback. We know there will be some “cheese moved” and missing, damaged, or broken stuff. We’re currently hard at work making everything perfect. Please, play around and help us find issues.
While this is a huge step for us, we’re already working on some new video and podcast ideas, building out the community sites for general use, improvign comments and even finishing a few apps by our own Benjamin Mayo. We’re now over 20 international writers network-wide as well as a whole back office full of folks dedicated to bringing you the latest news, information, and entertainment about the technology you love.
Thanks so much.
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Seth & Team,
I know you guys put a ton of time into your total redesign, but I’ve given it a week+ and just want to provide my feedback. I’ve visited the 9To5 sites 2-3 times/day for the last couple years. It is my most frequent visited set of sites except for google/gmail/etc. I didn’t want to be one of those users who freaks out anytime something changes, but after a week of using the new site format, I find the constant scrolling requirement to see even two entries problematic. I agree with the comments that the loss of screen space due to the top bar makes it worse (Do we need to see today’s date on the screen?) I also don’t like having to post comments using my twitter account (don’t have FB or WP – what happened to disqus?)
I’m wondering if the reason this might not have been noticed could be the large monitors that developers, like most in-office users, have these days. I think if you used the site on a MBAir or similar small screen device your team might have become irritated like many others.
One reason I would visit the site frequently was because I could easily scan the latest ‘toys articles in one page (even if I had to scroll) and also scan the sister sites via the column on the right. I simply flowed better for me.
I fully understand the need to sell ad space but the new layout gives up a lot of usable space between the ads and the top bar(s).
Please don’t take my comments as complaining, ranting, or slamming but rather a client sharing feedback on his experience with your ‘product’. I think you guys do a nice job with the sites and I’m sharing my feedback to hopefully get some the changes reversed because that’s the only way I can see me continuing to use the sites regularly. Otherwise it will seem like many of the other sites out there that take up too much space with pictures, ads, menus, etc. I greatly miss the old site and if you are unable to take us back to it, please make some substantive UI improvements very quickly.
Thanks and best of luck with the adjustments you are making.
Thanks a lot for the feedback
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts. We appreciate the kind words and helpful feedback. We’re still tweaking many design elements so stay tuned!
Unless the display is in portrait mode of a tablet at least 30% of the screen is covered either by title bar or the banner of 9to5* Feels a lot irritating to open the site at times. i have been a follower for almost 5-6 years and never felt its so bad
Thanks for your feedback – we’re working on tweaking the new design!
How do you hide comments once you show them?
Some posts with a lot of comments I want to read just the first few or so, but them have to scroll and scroll through the rest.
Why even Change it??? it was perfect the way it was. Because of this site iv’e been getting awesome electronic on sales. So why fix it when it’s not broken??????
There’s a huge amount of science that has existed for a very long time on the width of text blocks. There’s a reason that newspapers had columns rather than articles that spanned a page. For me its extremely difficult to read. I really like the 9to5 sites and will continue to visit, but skim more than read if the layout stays like this.
We’re planning on narrowing the text blocks in an update next week
An upgrade is always welcomed but this one is very unorganized. The visual hierarchy is very poorly done. The site’s main purpose of delivering information isn’t really being accomplished. Significant amount of my screen real estate is being occupied by the banner. It feels like squinting to read anything. The CSS codes seems to be very buggy. I am an avid reader but this update makes me not want to visit this site as often.
Thanks for the feedback
Needs more work. The hyperlink colors become invisible against the color backgrounds, making much of the site unreadable, particularly for color deficient individuals.
Agree with the others (surprised so few, though), truly awful on a Macbook Air. Claustrophobia in full effect.
The concept is good, but the execution is a little sloppy. As others have said, images are so big that it makes articles unreadable and the amount of scrolling makes navigation tedious. The black “Today” “Yesterday” etc bar is a little attention grabbing and needs to be more subdued. There’s a huge imbalance in font sizes across titles, article content, etc. Some page elements are fixed width and some are full width. Some UI elements aren’t well centered vertically. No offense, but this is kind of a mess.
I used to be able to seemlessly switch between 9to5 toys and 9to5Mac by simply clicking on the header.. however, now I need to scroll to the top of the page everytime to click on the link – Might reduce traffic to your site (Maybe the global nav bar needs to be static)
all good news but with the giant pics and wide screen are I feel like I need to zoom out!
I’m not a big fan of the HUGE 9to5 Toys banner, that travels with me as I scroll through the articles. Keep that thing up at the top and leave it there. Otherwise looks cleaner, I like it.
I HATE IT PLEASE PUT THE OLD LOOK BACK
Thanks for the feedback
I’m sorry but this looks horrible. All the photos that you post now are as wide as my big monitor and they just occupy the whole screen for no reason at all. I don’t need a full screen picture of a toy on my screen. I just want to see a small picture and its price.
I agree with you it’s HORRIBLE!!!!!
This change is not good. the images are too big, it makes it harder to scroll thru and look for articles. it seems as you scroll down the pictures pop up and send the article further down.
the 9to5 sites were some of my favorite, hitting them multiple times a day, this change it will be less enjoyable, and eventually stop, pretty quickly.
Big images on big screens seem to be the big complaint. While I’m a huge fan of big beautiful imagery, clearly many are not and scrolling is a lot more of a chore than we anticipated. We’re working on some fixes. Stay tuned.