"Since a large portion of all of this is obviously still Beta is it possible to access the old portal while the kinks are worked out? The new design will take some getting used to from my point of view - First reaction is its not terrible, which is a good thing :) "
Are you that stuck in a rut thtat you cant just view the new site as is? Is it REALLY that difficult that you require a portal to the old layout? Seriously, get a grip.
All that aside, I like the new site - it pops out at ya... Much improved and absolutely no reason to to back to the old.
maybe mobile friendly... but definitely definitely NOT remote desktop friendly. the animated flash ads that are all over the site lock up the remote console when you get to an ad. such a pain since i use remote to browse (to bypass web filters and such).
If he's like me it could be these newfangled sites wreak havoc with the ancient IE6 at work. Locked up IE completely when I tried to view this article at work (of course I only surf the internet at lunch ;-) Had to use task manager to shut it down.
It's fine on the home page, but for some reason opening the articles just locks up IE6. I can see the page but I can't scroll. I've found if I leave it sit for a few minutes it eventually loads the page but it can take five or ten minutes for this to happen. It's only in the articles though, no problem seeing or navigating the home page.
We're supposed to be going to IE7 (Yay, only one generation behind, for now) but who knows when that will happen.
I didnt mean to in anyway undervalue nor disrespect Anand or the team here at the site. When the site initially went online I found a few broken links and missing tags, and was curious if the old portal was still available. These issues all seem to be fixed now (except for the comments 'next' tag still taking me to the bottom of the page).
I kind of liked the old design better, where you could see the most recent article headlines all at once, rather than having to scroll. I find it to be a hassle. Also the giant banner ad right above the AnandTech logo looks rather tacky.
Does the site get revenues from viewed ads, or from clicked on ads? That's something that only Anand and company can really answer. In which case, is a blocked ad worse than a non-clicked ad?
I suspect that the answer is "a bit of both". I suspect that ads that are shown are worth some small amount, ads that are clicked on are worth more, and ads that lead to a "sale" are worth even more.
First and foremost, the most important part is that you support the site by reading the content. I appreciate everyone who does that. So, thank you :)
The majority of our ads are not paid for on a per click basis, it's per view. The more views we can offer, the more appealing we are to advertisers. We have strict policies against popups or other obnoxious ads. If there's ever something you see that really bothers you, please email me directly with a screengrab and I'll take a look at it ([email protected]).
The choice to block ads is entirely up to you. Regardless of whether or not you do, I still value you tremendously as a reader. It helps us if you don't but I understand the reason why some do. It's your choice but I value you the same regardless of your decision :)
Nice no BS answer I can respect. I always though that only ad click really counted but since it is not so I'm gonna whitelist anandtech right away. (does this mean I get more say with regards to the new design - just kidding).
That's a great response but as a fellow reader I really think deactivating Adblock is one small way to help such an awesome site and I personally think that's very much worth it.
Wow. I appreciate such a stand-up, honest approach. By the way, classy place you run here, Anand. I also like the new look. I loved being able to see all the latest articles without having to scroll, but realistically, I'm here everyday so it's not all that necessary. I'll make sure to give ol' Anandtech a plug everytime I get the chance. Thanks for everything, guy!
I thought about that space on the left and right too, until my gut instinct told me it could be there because the site would also need to accommodate users who may not be viewing the site on a widescreen device, or those who may not have their browser window maximized (windows 7 winkey+left/right arrow). So i tried both scenarios - I thought the site looked really good in both scenarios - no wasted space on the left or right sides.
Exactly. Unfortunately, from my understanding, the standard screen you still need to accommodate for these days is 1024x768. I blame the corporate market! *shakes fists*
I too liked the old design. As you said, it was easier to see the most recent articles head lines all at once. And the small text below the pictures at the top was nice. May be the text of a picture could appear/unfold below its title when moving the cursor on that picture.
Otherwise, as far as I have seen, the new look is nice.
1. I don't want to scroll my screen in order to see article topics, the more I can see instantly after opening the front page, the better.. up to some limit, but the old one was not too full. I do not want to do many actions. 2. Rotation in flash is BAD, because it takes time and requires actions (overly complicated). You get bigger buttons for the articles, but that has little value. It is better to have less area for recent articles, and get more articles in the same space.
Yes, what is it exactly that the carousel does? Does it simply show the 5 newest articles posted on the front page? Or will it also hold unique content that hasn't been pushed down to the main list, kind of how the old layout did? Because at this point I'm just skipping over the damn thing and reading the front page listings underneath it. It's faster then watching the carousel slide by or manually clicking though it. Which, naturally, makes it kind of pointless.
Ok, after watching it over the course of the week, the carousel seems to do nothing more then slowly cycle through the five newest articles on the front page. Isn't that somewhat redundant? Those same articles are directly below it.
I don't want to sound like I'm harping on the new design though, because the rest of the site is very clean looking.
Congratulations to all of you in AnandTech team! After years of hard works, this up to date nice looking new design is finally here. Hope that AnandTech will become better & better, take care :)
The new logo is awesome, but the whole top area is way too big vertically! The logo and nav buttons make up almost 400 vertical pixels, not even including a banner ad, thats way too much.
Any chance of implementing the "page width/expansion" button that was on the old Anandtech site. I have lots of blue border space on the right and left. This results in more up/down scrolling, from all the wasted space on the sides. My resolution is at 1600x1200....
I agree, I used that too as I am running 1600x1050 and have four monitors, so I usually browse full screen on one of them. It would be nice to be able to make the page wider to fill the gap.
Keep the requests coming, it helps us to hear what you guys want :) We're going to be updating this a lot over the coming weeks and months so let your voice be heard!
What would be awesome is a side by side page format, having 1 page 1920 wide is too wide, which is why newspapers use columns of text, it looks better and is easier to read. Having 2 or 3 pages side by side would be awesome and very fast to read.
Actually, widening the text would be bad ... an option to switch to TWO columns of text of let's say 500 pixels would be great.... I'm sure you know lots of readers have over 1680 pixels width, a lot 1920x1080 , so two x 500 px wouldn't be two big of a stretch i think....
Also the comments cascading seems to make the text area longer and longer vertically. so ,say after 100 replys will the last comment display 1char or word per line?
And here are my views. 1 LOOKs FRESH. 2. ..mmm seems similar to hothardware. 3.on 1680*1050 and 1920*1080- looks ok. but on 1280*960 - all i can see is BIG navigation bars/menu and equally BIG LOGO -nothhing else ( 4.I liked the orange Moustache on the old logo.This Moustache is kind of - dull.(my opnion )
I thought I misstyped the url today. the new layout looks great and much better than the old one.
however there are some quirks to work on (I am writing this comment without actualy seeing the article or previous comments, so I have no clue where it will post).
Crap! The Print function is there, it's just hidden right now. The widget it is a part of has some additional functionality that's not enabled right now. I'll try to get it enabled asap though, I know a lot of folks use it!
I second that! After the initial jar of seeing the new layout the first thing I noticed was the lack of the print button. I too enjoy reading the whole articles on a single page as I can scroll back and forth as I please to suit my reading style.
The second control or button I thought this site had was a width button which allowed a wider view of the pages especially on wide screen monitors. I don't even have one on this computer and almost 40% of the screen is wasted in grey borders with a thin strip left in the middle for content. (of which a 1/3 is consumed by the right sidebar). It would look ok on a monitor in portrait mode, but that's not an option here.
Anand, you have a great site. I come here first for tech news and reviews and check the "others" later because the content is great and easy to access. Keep up the good work!
The print button is (for me) one of the reasons that makes the diference with others tech sites, I NEED view the articles in one single page for analize yours excelents reviews
Just want to say thanks for all your efforts Anand and team for making it my favourite tech site on the internet. It's nice to hear you still enjoy publishing articles after all these years, so long may it continue :)
Overall it's a very, very nice look. Even being so used to the old layout, I was almost instantly comfortable with the new one, which is a great sign and shows the quality of the design.
There are some incredibly minor things that I would personally tweak, but only one worth mentioning; the lack of any break between the vertical list of articles is a little jarring. Something very subtle (like ArsTechnica's line of dots) might work well without breaking the excellent "clean" aesthetic you've got going.
Hmm, I suddenly miss the old design, but we have to move forward eventually, right?
I like the larger font; makes it easier on the eyes. The header portion (logo, search box, etc) has too much space on top/bottom. I'm not too cool with the review box scrolling on its own, does anyone else feel this way? And I agree with some other comments here that I have to scroll a lot to get to the next story on the front page, eg one story takes up the entire height of my browser window
I second that - there could be less space between the row with the logo/home/about/forums/etc and the row with cpus/motherboards/ssds/etc. It also seems to me that there's too much space around "Follow Anandtech".
1) When making comments it takes you to a page where you can no longer see the other comments. When responding to someone unless you copy and paste everything they say it is easy to misquote them or even just forget what they are saying.
2) No real real estate gained for the articles, if anything the articles feel just as narrow as the old ones.
3) the text and arrangement of the articles feel less polished and professional. I'm not quite sure what it is, but it just looks like a big wall of text when looking at the Fermi article
It would be nice to be able to view the comment or thread we're replying to. It's a little annoying to have to click between tabs to see the other posters' text.
Long time lurker. Just registered to post this. Since I visited the site daily I could look over at the Dailytech section and the article section and know what was new. Now in order to do that I have to scroll and scroll and scroll vertically down the page, or very slowly horizontally in the giant preview windows. It's a big disappointment in my mind since it makes finding content a lot slower which is all I cared about anyway.
If you need to scroll that much, you should just get a monitor with a remotely decent res. As it sounds like you're using 800x600 or something. For me i dont have to scroll to see all the DT stuff on the right.
I have the same issue with the Dailytech list of headlines. I liked them up where they used to be, right under the box that listed the new articles on Anandtech that I hadn't yet read. Those two boxes were the fastest way for me to find what I was looking for - fresh articles.
The social-networking business that's taken that space now isn't something I plan on using - though I'm sure others will find it handy.
On the other hand, the site currently uses about 50% of the width of my screen (1920x1200). Maybe more content could be brought to the front where a viewer will see it without having to scroll down. I say maybe because I can also appreciate having a non-cluttered look.
Another point on site width - I actually like the articles coming out as columns about the width they are now. I don't like reading a mile-long string of text before hitting the next line. I think the article text field width has been pretty good so far, so please don't change that.
Agree with the poster- too much white space and not enough information. I'm using a 24" 1920x1200 and I prefer to have fewer expanses of white space that I have to scroll through.
It's inevitable that tech sites seem to feel the need to adopt advertising industry design standards.
GREAT site, btw, and a regular stop for the best technical analyses- however, it's a step backwards, in my opinion, for a site that has a lot of info to present...
To each his own-
I felt the same way about Tom's Hardware when they changed their format and I find I seldom visit that site anymore.
Oh and i'd also like to add, the DT and Twitter section on the right is too wide. So while the mid section is wider on a whole, the actual article space is the same (or maybe even less?).
The article area needs to be wider. But like i say above, having the option to change the mid section size like with the old site will fix this anyway.
I entered this morning...opened the site from bookmarks so I knew it the address is correct and :O)..I remained huh?! :)) Maybe the logo and menus could be slightly smaller...but then again I'm using an 1280x1024 native resol now and I think more use 1680x1050 or even 1920x1080..and for them probably looks OK.. all in one the change is welcomed
I realize this is beta. Just my first impressions.
The new design is stunning. The colors are MUCH easier on the eyes. The scrolling pics at the top is wonderful eyecandy, but I think the transition after a click could be more snappy.
I still think there should be a wide format option (am I missing it?). Those with widescreen displays should have the option to show more content, pictures and text if they desire:)
I'm a fan of the twitter section, and new logo! It's obvious you all put some thought into the layout and color schemes. Try not to dwell on the anti-change crowd. Cheers!
In general I like the new look and color scheme. It's much more modern.
My main concern is the size of the header and menus which seem to take up vertically half of a 1440x900 screen so it takes more scrolling than needed to get to the actual content. As others have mentioned, I think the gap between the Anandtech logo and Home/About/etc menu and the CPUs/Motherboards/etc categories can be reduced. I think the categories themselves are kind of big, especially the orange secondary categories which seem to be small text floating in a sea of orange. The excess vertical space bordering the primary and secondary category text could probably be trimmed. That's my preference anyways.
I gotta say I am not a big fan of these changes. The main page reads like a blog now. There is just too much information thrown in my face. I would rather have a simple short paragraph and a picture explaining the article/review being linked.
Love the new look. Minor suggestion, when scrolling between pages of comments, it leaves you at the bottom of the next page, which doesn't make a lot of chronological sense. You could either anchor the link it to the top of the comments on the new page or provide a link to switch pages at the top and bottom of the comments (think Google).
Congratulations on meeting the self-imposed Q1 '10 deadline AnandTech! Just need to update the favicon to the new logo and I would say that you guys are good to go! <3
The header logo is too big, furthermore, there's too much wasted vertical space (category buttons have massive white space around them) and, there is too much wasted horizontal space, and there's too much duplication (that silly thing near the top that you can click left and right to scroll through the stories? Yeah, ditch it, total waste of space, since it's horribly slow to navigate).
I liked the way the old design had the most important stories in a clear layout at the top with a brief description, and the blog type posts would never clutter this area.
All the images on the page are too big, and it just feels like I'm scrolling forever to get anywhere near the same amount of content on the screen as before.
You can see the problem right there in your own screenshot: the old design, 6 articles at one time, and it doesn't look cluttered (although it could use stretching to fit horizontally, too), and the new design, 3, and one of them is shown twice(!)
I have nothing against a redesign if it offers a cleaner and nicer way to view things, but.. this isn't it.
Second that. even on my 24" about 1/3 of the vertical page is taken up by the header, that's too much. I can barely see one extra article. And the "teaser texts" + "cover pic" for the older articles are also to big, I need to scroll too much to get an overview over al the latest articles. It's a good thing though to be able to read the full teaser texts actually, it has always annoyed me to read half of the text on the front page, click on the article and not find it here!? (I know I can read it by going to the articles category, but that's not exactly good web design to force a user to take a detour just to read the teaser). So make the pics smaller, cut down on the teaser text AND finally start putting that teaser text on the first page of your articles. Please? But maybe keep showing articles in the carousel and the main column, I like that I have ALL the articles in a chronological order there.
And a link to the blogs is missing, where are the tabs below the carousel?
Overall I like it though, even though it feels like a big change. All the other updates over the eight years I've been coming here were really minor and never changed the feel of the site like this, but if you do it right the site could be better in every single way :)
PS: Are you using a custom CMS or one of the usual suspcts? I'm still too much of a newbie to figure that out by the source...
the new layout is quite easy on the eyes, I like it, and that means it's truly great, because it usually takes me some time to start to like such changes
anyway, just a couple of things I don't like:
* keep the horizontal section with the latest articles stationary; I don't want it to scroll through the latest aditions, and, at the least, I don't want it to do so by itself (if you want to keep the scroll there, at least put a "pause" button somewhere, and let the cookie remember I want it stationary)
* the "next" button in the comments section takes you to the END of the next page of comments, while it should be (and used to be) the beginning
I like the comments section and how you can view all posts. Easier to follow your own thread and see that questions and comments about the relevant articles are ignored.
From a UX point of view, the navigation is pretty good. The guy above me mentions "Too much whitespace" - totally wrong. The use of whitespace is actually good, as it distinguishes between the various content.
Good colour scheme as well, well done to whoever came up with that!
Now, some criticism: - The frontpage is definitely worse; the intros shown now are much longer, and you don't get a quick glance at what's new. My suggestion would be to add a headline box above the actual listing.
- Minor, but you should really make the comments hard linked instead of pure AJAX. I know it looks cool, but it's horrible from a user point of view as the back button doesn't work anymore for example. Easy fix though; in the click handler, relocate the user to currenturl#pageid - catch that pageid on page load as well, and you can properly hardlink again, with all the benefits of back/forward buttons and whatnot.
- The ad at the top has to be relocated. I know you thrive on ads partially, but your webdevelopers should really read up on some studies from the past few years. Ads are generally overlooked, unless interwoven with content; the one to the right is placed well, because it's constantly in view. Google for "website eyetracking" or "website heatmaps" to find some extracts from and tips based on these studies.
- < and > aren't allowed in posts, brackets or accolades around a word that isn't a valid BB tag also crash the app, might want to write alternative code for that ;)
I thought that feature was good but now it seems that you get 50 posts per page max. Still, much better than before where your post might be on page 2 one day and 4 the next.
It's nice, in theory, but I like to be able to see more stories. Having massive pictures, massive amounts of text on the summary/preview etc, it feels like a cheap blog.
I want to be able to see much more content without having to scroll. Surely people are going to be less likely to click on things if they have to scroll a lot?
On my 1280x800 laptop screen, the only thing I can see is the 3 articles in the carousel. That's it. I have to do a lot of scrolling to see anything further back than that, or to see any of the recent article text summaries (which are too long).
The scheme is nice. The ideas are nice. The execution IMO sucks unless you are running a 30" monitor in portrait mode. Everything needs to be smaller and more compact so more is viewable on the screen, like it used to be. For instance, change the carousel so each image is smaller, and maybe make it 4 wide or so by default. Reduce the space around the categories so they don't take up such a large proportion of the screen.
At the moment it goes: Gap Banner Gap Headers/logo Gap Categories Gap Carousel Gap Titles (Latest Post/Follow AT) Title (of most recent article) Small Gap ACTUAL WRITTEN CONTENT. JACKPOT. E x c e s s i v e l y L o n g S u m m a r y
ARTICLE TITLE NUMBER TWO SECOND LOT OF CONTENT! JACKPOT!
i am actually looking at the page using Opera Mobile 10 on a Samsung Omnia II and was surprised to see how fast it loaded - even the carousel. I am using HSPA, not Wi-Fi so that is even more impressive for a design that looks modern like this.
Only main display glitch is a white box at the top right obscuring the Bench item and anything to the right (though the search bar is present).
I realize mobile access probably isn't a priority but overall it still seems to work well. Awesome job!
Articles are more attractively displayed. BUT, you really need a quicker navigation option. I want to be able to see in one glance whether there's anything I'm interested in, and then to jump to it.
First of, congratulations on the overhaul! It's very nice and easy on the eyes. I have a small question for everyone, what is this banner ad on top everyone keep referring to? Is it the blank space above the AnandTech logo? 'cause I don't see any ad up there. Also, I have a couple of suggestions: 1) In the comments it would be nice to have the buttons to choose which page of comments I'm viewing on top as well as the bottom. 2) When I do click on the next page of the comments it should anchor to the first comment and not stay at the bottom, which makes you scroll all the way to the top to read them. 3) I'd like to see the comments numbered, so I could find certain comments more easily. Thanks!
And yeah, it does look less professional now, aside from the new logo which looks nice. The harsh color contrasts (the orange submenu bar for example). The lack of a simple, straightforward, cohesive menu/nav, replaced by two rows of disjointed, inexplicably differentiated options, plus a third row of options to the right of the menu, which sort of get lost in the header. All the extra "space" around things really wastes efficiency and above-the-fold real estate.
While there are some improvements with the "new look", the headline, rotating article teasers, bolded article titles, and ALL THE GRAPHICS are WAY TOO BIG. Especially the graphics. Not only does this kinda detract from the aesthetics of the new look, but it mandates way too much scrolling to actually read stuff. Anandtech looked better before, IMHO, because you could actually read a lot on each screen. By oversizing the graphics and bolding, it now looks like every other graphic designers inyourface idea of what a website should look like that you see around the web.
You used to have a cool print article functionality that displayed the whole article on one page, making it very convenient to read. Is that gone for good now? True that it did bug out sometimes, like not displaying galleries but {{galleryblahblah}} or something, yet I will miss it.
I'll probably end up making some greasemonkey script to fetch the other pages and append them to the first, but why do you want to make me go this extra trouble at all?
On the article category banner....CPUs, Motherboards, etc.....why change the appearance of the second line, i.e. different type sizes and colors? This adds to the graphical clutter and messiness that are all too common. Since both lines are the same content (same level categories), how about one type size and one color? Also, why rotate 5 main article graphics? Its pointless to not allow the reader to see all five at once, unless someone just wants to demonstrate that they can do this, and it makes the reader work to see all of them by clicking the arrows. A reader can scan all 5 in 2-3 seconds and shouldn't be made to either wait or have to do something to read all of them. Like the category banner issue, the rotation just adds to graphical messiness and distraction.
Where am I , oh its Anand...looks great, hey this is way better..
Well done and thank you.. Really very nicely done.
And for those with advert problems, Anandtech need adverts, its revenue and its as simple as that, we don't pay Anandtech for their hard work bringing us great reviews and content, the adverts do! If you don't like them get an ad blocker installed. I do like the Ads and have even benefited from them!
where's the option to print the article? I have limited access at work and I like to print the articles so I can read them on break/at lunch. Love the look....it's clean and fresh.
I was quite used to it after all this years. The new one one looks clean though. It will take some time to get used to it but I'm sure I'm going to love it :)
Great job!!. I really like the new website. It's looks cool and it is much snappier than the older one. It's is now more pleasure to read tech related articles here.
I was skeptical about the site re-design, but let me be the first (or the seventy-sixth to be exact) to congratuluate you and the whole AT team on a great site re-design. I love how you have improved the comments system.
My only suggestion is to make the left and right arrows for scrolling the latest articles work when you hover over them, as opposed to clicking them each time to scroll. This would be great!
The animation is evil, if i leave firefox with the main page visible and change the virtual desktop i get a 15% cpu usage spike every time it slides. I've got a core i7 930, linux gentoo 64bit, firefox 3.6.2 and it's the same with chromium 5.0.342.7. There most probably is no way to handle this for you since the browser might not even know it's not visible, so what I'd want is an alternative view without the animation or maybe just a standard list with shorter descriptions, honestly whatever just no js and no animations. I guess I can just forbid scripts with no-script but that creates quite a bit of wasted space and gets rid of the ads.
it seemed to display more info in the same amount of screenspace. also light colors are better than dark colors and the font sizes are too big on the new page. too much scrolling is required. what happened to the ability to print the articles?
I have only spent minutes with the new design so can't comment extensively. But one feature I don't see that I really liked is the ability to print an article. Not that I actually printed them out, but to me that made reading the article so much more enjoyable. To be able to scroll through the entire article on screen rather than page forward and back, or jump page-to-page. Hope you can add that feature!!!
Now if you can only get a few more comment moderators to sift out the spammers, I'd be hard pressed to enjoy comments from any other tech site. The commentors here are very knowledgeable. I'd hate for their voices to be drowned out.
Also why leave the "Latest from AnandTech" with "DailyTech" and "Twitter" when viewing the article, the contents kinda feels to cramped and too offset to the left, my screen is already to the left since I have a 2 screen setup so I guess it's worse for me than others, but still when viewing an article you probably don't want to distract people from the contents itself, also it might be a good idea to make the top thinner (just when viewing articles) for people with low vertical resolution, since they have to scroll more when switching pages.
Hehehe keep in mind most of the people who say "this is could be better i can't clearly see the content, or i have to scroll to see it" are actually praising you for the content you produce;) and just want more of it, so it's not really negative feedback;p
* Please restore option for printing an entire article.
* An option to show comments *only* on first/last page would be nice. Otherwise, it's too easy to overshoot the navigation popup between the articles and the comments.
First surprise in the early morning... new anandtech design :)
I must say I got really used to the old one and I usually don`t like redesigns... if you ask me, you could go with the old one forever :) But, changes are needed, and here they are .... I must say that complete site haven`t lost any of its simplicity and easy to find anything design... I`m already used to it... I have only one little remark ... top flash theme scroller is a bit slow when clicking on the arrows on the sides, nothing else:)
I think the redesign looks fantastic. It has a very modern feel, without the clutter or "'visual soup" so many other recent website redesigns have gone through. There's no confusion, and no sense of "where do I look?".
The only thing I noticed is the "top stories" scrolling bar moves very, VERY slowly for me (Firefox 3.6) and the forums now look decidedly dated. My personal option is that the top stores shouldn't be a rotation of recent stories (those are always a very short scroll away anyways) but a promotion of the three most important stories of the last few days/weeks -- IMO, that's where AnandTech should highlight the three (and three only, no scrolling) most important/relevant stories of the entire week.
The site definitely needed an update. The colors and style is much improved over the old design. I agree with many that, while I do like things to be spaced and padded, there seems to be too much of it and alot of wasted real estate both vertical and horizontal. The vertical scrolling to get to articles does not bother me. This seems to be the way many sites are moving these days (engadget, joystiq, etc). Besides, probably 95% of users check this site regularly, so the articles that are farther down the page should not need to be accessed on a regular basis as they will already have been read. If they do, use the search box to find it.
Good work guys, this is much improvement, but could still use some tweaking to make it outstanding.
I realize you have to pay the bills, but obviously the ads get in the way of an ideal layout.
Lots of wasted space in the menu bars. Everything seems way to large.. But I guess you're optimizing it for a higher resolution than 1280x1024. I have to scroll down two big mouse wheel rolls to get to news and articles. I'll probably stop coming here as much with this design.
Trolls use this system to downrate valid opinions, that's not fair. Without such an idiotic troll-friendly system dailytech would be much better place..
As I sometimes don't get to the site every day, or have an RSS feed to the site, it was very handy to have the articles on the left-hand "Latest from AnandTech" column to be broken up by date posted. Please consider adding this to the final format for the site.
Dear Anand, long time reader (5 years), best reviews on the web. This is my first message, but I have to say I do not like your new design at all. IMAGES at the top are way to big, that it distracts from reading the words. all DIV spacing are massively oversized. Takes 20 seconds to scroll down the page, while only seeing one article at a time on the screen. The whole site now looks like a cheesy Word Press article.
As a reader I want to see everything quick in one go and with all the information on the screen with out causing eye strain. TOM’s hardware did the same thing a couple of years ago, complete redesign and the end result was terrible I never read another article, so hard to find things and hard on the eyes, same problem here, I never went back to TOMS hardware. But time will tell on this site, say after 1 month you do notice a drop in traffic; would you consider putting back the old design? Thanks
I hate the new design. Sorry to be blunt, I'm sure you worked hard on it, but when I go to a site I want to know it's content. Content as in articles, words, information. Big glossy space-wasting graphics don't provide any information. This site has been part of my daily Web surfing routine for over a decade, because I could pop it up, glance over the headers and see if there was anything I wanted to read. (Key word: "read".) Now instead of glancing at the home page I have to click through some stupid carousel or scroll down pages of space. Why would you make your readers work harder to get to the articles that interest them?
I strongly agree with this post. The new layout is very attractive, but impractical. The old one made it possible to quickly scant he page to find new items of interest. The new one requires searching around, and will result in people leaving for sites that allow them to quickly find new items of interest.
Great work! Here's a couple of request for the technical crowd:
- Would it be possible to have a "wider" layout on a click of a button? My personal resolution is 1920* and would appreciate a 1200 or 1400 px wide view of the page... according to wiki, 76% of users have > 1024* res. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_resolution
Could we get a link to browser/OS stats for your readers? You often have articles on browsers and oses, could be good to know what the browser % is from a technical site.
Well, The site doesn't really appear any wider for me, as I have 4 inch gray bars on the side, that have nothing in them at all. Will this change? Sure I can zoom in on the site but then everything is super huge.
I liked the old page way better. This new page takes longer to load and has less information available on one screen. The old was much more compact and efficient. I don't get why all these sites feel the need to change their homepages, first Yahoo, then Tom's, ect. It's like there is a bunch of IT guys with nothing better to do trying to justify their jobs. Please, if it ain't broke, don't fix it !!!
I can't say I'm a fan of the orange. It's very jarring. Maybe it's just because it's different, but I liked the way the old site kind of "flowed" with varying shades of blue/gray.
I appreciate the desire to mix things up and while the new design is nice and clean perhaps even pretty there are some issues. Here is my good and bad list.
1. I like the new colours. Bright but not too bright.
2. The new forum format works and looks nice. A+
3. Speed is nice. I'm thinking slightly longer to load than the old but not slow (Note this is on a 20 Mb line and a new PC, so some may think differently).
4. A lot more space on the top is needed for menus and such. Something like 450 pixels just for the top ad, the logo and top menus seems rather excessive and when you include the 280 or so for the ticker which advertises the different articles there is a lot of screen spaced used for not that much info. I'm on a big screen and I can just imagine how this is on a laptop or even a 24" 16:9 screen!
5. The ticker which advertises the different articles is very annoying. Please do away with the auto-scrolling it makes it like a huge ad across the page . Maybe just the headlines with mouse-over showing pictures and a teaser is an option or maybe just the headlines as links.
6. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. I know I'm repeating my self but on the old page I could see straight away what new articles was posted since last visit and also the DT headlines. The new articles seems to have gone and to see the DT headlines I have to scroll a good deal (and this on a 2560x1440 screen).
All in all I think the new design could draw in more user due to it's initial friendlyness but perhaps there could be a compact versions for those which like a higher information density. It could be in ones profile and main changes should be:
- making the menu area in the top more compact - doing away with the ticker and just listing the article headlines - highlighting the titles of the ones which has been added since last visit. - Bring DT headlines up so they are on the first page (so no scrolling is needed) - Maybe an option to put menus in a vertical bar and maybe combine this with support for free choice of page width.
Final words: Keep the good articles coming but please less bling.
The categories at the top are just what we launched with. We will have many more going forward, HDDs included :) Users have just been asking for an easy way to see SSD content so now we have anandtech.com/tag/ssds.
So far, I like the new design. Reminds me a little bit of the Engadget site design, except that it's coded much better! :) Very clean and modern-looking design.
The previous AnandTech web design was sensible, practical, and usable. The new design emphasizes form over function, and we the users will suffer for it.
The scrolling headlines are obnoxious. They force users to pause, fast forward, or wait tediously to see them all, instead of being able to merely read the headlines as we used to do.
Article links are no longer a different color if visited. It may look more uniform to the web designer, but for users it means we can no longer tell at a glance which articles we have already read.
In article view, there used to be a print option which let users print or read the article as one long document, instead of having to tediously click through page after page.
Your content and site usability have made you the best for years, please don't ruin your site usability. At least let users access the lost functionality mentioned above with a classic view option, even if you don't bring back the lost functionality by default.
can you make the banner scroll faster on the main page? when i click the arrows, it scrolls really slow to the next one, no point being that slow? make it fast like google flip.
Congrats on the new look. It is a welcome ovehaul! Here's what I miss:
- how do I remember my login and/or password? I just had to create a new account because I could not find a way to retrieve my previous login information .
- where is the 'Print this article' feature? That was very handy; not that I ever printed any article, but it was very handy to be able to have an entire article at the touch of a scroll button. Please bring that back!
1. The ad at the absolute top of the page looks off. Should be lowered, at least under your logo. Possibly to the right under HOME | ABOUT | ECT
2. The CPU -> IT COMPUTING and Smartphones -> Guides tiling is too thick. Make the stuff a bit thinner. Im thinking anywhere from 40-80 pixels. It should look more streamlined.
3. The right side looks good,though the Follow Anandtech could be polished a bit. Looks tossed in there.
4. When a user is in an article, have a readability mode. Allow us to the over the right panel and re-show it again with a button click, and possibly further than that allow us to utilize our full screen width.
5. Colors could use some work (a bit more pale possibly, some colors are too vibrant, takes away from the logo and content imho)
Please ignore whatever Im missing, and thanks for the improvement, long time reader.
1) Nice change in layout. Clean lines, good fonts used - striking new anandtech logo on upper left. Solid colors in navigation bars.
2) I like the left-right scrolling of headlines, allows me to spend a minute viewing the article features - or I can just scroll down and skim them instead.
3) Good placement of ads, the site loaded faster for me where it counts, i did not have to wait for the ads to load in order to view the first "page" on my screen. Allows me to check the site in 5 seconds.
I am going to refrain from the dislikes because I realize this is a beta site, and that any that any of my "cons" would be in reference to my mindset of the old layout. I want to see how this evolves, because the new site clearly triggers a new mindset for me to view.
Keep up the great work, and great articles, Anandtech crew!!
The new design reminds me of NASA. I don't know why and I am not saying it is bad. Though the upper part is too "empty" - big buttons, big spaces = wasted area. On my 1024x1280 monitor the menus use about 1 third of the visible area. the second third is used up by the preview gallery on the front page. You could make parts of the front-page customizable - but that would probably come at conformance cost too big...
The new design looks great although takes quite a bit more screen space. One thing missing, I usually springboard from your site to Dailytech. Could you bring back a direct link to Dailytech on the right side?
I appreciate the idea of more white-space and the such and love the idea of enhancing the websites performance although only through an impersonal approach as personally I don't ever have any performance issues. However I'm forced to say that in general I greatly prefer the old layout to the new layout. It just doesn't seem right for some reason, and it reminds me of the switch tomshardware went through right before they started going down big-time as far as the quality/interest of their articles... not that I'm saying the same thing is happening to anandtech but just as a comparison.
As far the scroll bar thing goes... It does move too slow when you click it and unless you're crazy fast it's hard to tell if there's any new articles by looking at it since it moves so fast... unfortunately I think the old method dealt with this better, maybe making the scroll bar remain stationary and letting the user click through it would work better?. The layout as far as the main links and everything up top looks confusing (although easier to figure out for new visitors) and unconnected to the rest of the site.
Also the logo needs some work, at this point I'm still considering the old logo to look better, both to old and new visitors, the first few letters look good but then the rest looks like it was make with office's word-art. Ah, and the links to the right of the article seems to take up too much room, maybe shrink that column and enlarge the articles column?
Sorry about being so negative... I hope you can get it to the point that even I can agree that transition to the new site is a 100% positive event : ).
Looks like the speed of the scrolling got adjusted as I typed my previous comment... I still think the pause before it starts to scroll should be a little longer or perhaps it shouldn't automatically scroll... as it's a little distracting to me personally,... but it's an improvement : ).
Sorry but you fail. The new Engadget/blog/whatever style is generic and unprofessional and ugly. Try again with something that doesn't look like a wordpress theme, or go back to the old one that doesn't look like its trying to compete with Apple for the most pretentious user interface award
That thing is a complete CPU hog. On a [email protected] I go from 0-25%+ CPu usage just by scrolling that bar. I can only imagine how bad it is on lower power laptops or netbooks. Just make it snap to the next article, no fancy 'smooth scrolling' needed.
Just want to say that the new site looks great, my only comment would be on the front page if the latest post area can be shrunk a bit so we can see more head lines? my scroll bar shrunk alot when I first entered = more scrolling
Great work on the site. There is alot to like, but sometimes we first notice certain changes not as desirable at first.
First off, the decision to limit the width to 1024 pixels is still disappointing in 2010, and still seems quite outdated on a site primarily revolving around reading material. I may just start using the RSS/mobile link all the time instead. As someone who knows how to design a site with a minimum width that can stretch, I understand the extra design work necessary, but it's a shame my 1900x1200 still goes wasted with 900 pixels of grey on this site unless I flip the monitor 90 degrees for this site. 1024 pixel width with text limited to 800 or so pixels width, seems outdated to me. The site is now even more all about vertical scrolling on my wide screen monitor, seems counter productive in that respect.
Speaking of flipping the monitor 90 degrees, it makes me wonder if that isn't the way it was designed, in that ratio. Wide screen may still be a minority, but 90 degree tilted wide screens is even a smaller minority of that minority still.
There is a huge amount of vertical space wasted on the site, from the top down, to where an article begins in the bottom third of the 1200 pixel monitor. Waste above and below first ad, first main menu, main menu bar has tons of wasted vertical space below and above text. it would be fine if this was a console and I was using a controller, but I use a mouse so i can rollover the huge fields Then the three image scrolling menu, while fancy, it is too slow(on a fast machine) and too big. 4 or 5 menu items with pics seems better horizontally.
I wish I could rotate my 1900x1200 monitor for all my web viewing 5 times a day, but I keep my aspect standard all day long and it's a shame more sites don't support wide screen monitors properly, by auto stretching more horizontally, not making me scroll more vertically. I know some of this is too late as to the design, but maybe some of the vertical space waste can be fixed. So not only is the horizontal unused, vertical is wasted in forcing me to always scroll more.
Otherwise, it looks clean and I will find more to like, I like the colors too, I just wanted to share some of my initial dislikes while the comparison between old and new is still fresh in my mind.
One thing that's putting me off as a web designer: the reply box immediately makes me think of a quote box. I think it would be far better to use a colour much closer to the normal comments colour, i.e, only a few shades lighter so it doesn't stand out so much.
I usually open read Ars, Techspot and Anandtech everyday. I set my browser to open all three tabs automatically. When I got to the new Anandtech I thought I was looking at Techspot. I looks exactly the same.
Thank you for your knowledge and insight over these 13 years. I have come to this site since I was in college and consider this site probably the best tech site on the internet. I still come here now that i'm in IT for you server and ESX software reviews.
It would be nice to be able to navigate to the Daily Tech latest headlines page from the right side bar. In the old version it would show as many "latest articles" as it could and then you could click more headlines and it would take you there (http://www.dailytech.com/Headlines.aspx).
I used the print article function and it always opened a new window with all the separate pages of the article. I could scroll down much faster than opening new windows to get to the parts of interest. Especially useful to print the whole article. Hope you bring it back. Thank you...
The styling for bold text and for hyperlinks seems to be identical - makes it hard to know what's clickable and what's just emphasized. Probably should be changed for usability.
However I do have one comment to make... a fairly small one, but one that is kind of annoying me.
Please reduce the size of the top and bottom "borders" along the top horizontal menus.
It looks like there's a large 15 pixel border above and below the words. It's inefficient use of space and a bit annoying. I'd rather not have the navigation smacking me over the head.
the site is going to feel like were back in 2004, as you put it, until you make it possible for it to scale in size with resolution. there are plenty of other examples of this being capable (look at the forums), and it would make the viewing experience on a widescreen monitor while fullscreen much more streamlined. also, i havent tested on my iphone yet, but make sure the site still runs well on mobile devices
It looks like you guys have been spending a lot of time pondering the mysteries of WP7S.
Me likey.
And yes, I've been reading this site since... '01? Maybe '02? I was fond of the old design, but I like the new one, too. It's your site, so if it makes you happy...
Am I the only one who gets the articles through RSS feed? I was curious when I didn't get any new feeds for two days. And then DT stopped sending feeds today. And my bookmark to AT got a server error. Finally got to AT through an old article link. Anyway I knew changes were coming, though it would be nice to know that the RSS feed URL's were going to change, and that old bookmarks may not redirect. Oh, and after reading 18 pages of comments, I can say I don't know if I like the new site, but I don't care if there is a print article button or not. Save a tree for christ's sake.
Looks like you're targeting 1024x768, but: - given that readers of anandtech are power users, very few have 1024 horizontally, so you can safely default to 1280 (and you may offer, somewhere, a 1024 option for netbook users); - the header of the homepage (ad+logo+menu) is 50% of the screen (vertically) for 95% of readers; - there's a useless gray line at the top; - too much space before/after the top ad; - logo too tall (plus the menu on the right - menu 1 (HOME/ABOUT)); - too much space between the logo and the menu 2 (CPU/MoBo/SSD); - menu 2 uses excessive padding (space lost); - menu 3 (Smartphones/Memory) uses excessive padding around a very small font; - on regular pages, space lost (vertically) is 145px: 65 before the logo, 50 between logo and menu 2, 30 because excessive padding in the menu 2 and 3; - on the targeted resolution (1024x768), the logo is too much on the left, there are only 2px there. Move it another 20px to the right; - consider highlighting the selected category/menu item; - there's not much space for ads in the first 800px of the page. In the home page, you can place only one ad (at the top), in regular pages you can barely fit 1.5 ads (at the top plus half of vertical ad on the right). You get your money for all the ads in the page but your score gets very low because advertisers want people to see ads without scrolling.
And I don't know what you've had against the old logo. Seeing the page header, my first impression is that I've set my browser on large fonts.
On the home page, the latest posts section uses some very big pictures. And too much text. No matter what you do and what screen you have, you can't see more than one product/review at once. It doesn't actually give a quick view over several posts.
Guys, You could serve the MS Ajax library and mvc scripts from Microsoft's CDN. It might save you a bit on bandwidth. I think it also serves jquery as well.
Ah, and the ajax loading of comments... You're at comment nr. 10, click on next and expect to see the next page, the comment nr. 11. Nope, you see the next page but you have to scroll up cause you're at the bottom, you see the comment nr. 20.
You want to look more like 2010? Then how about forgetting 1995? You have to make a first page with at least 1650 pixels in mind, if not 1920. Putting big photos and more colors in a 1024X8000!!! pixels page it just makes it worst.
I am sorry but with the new look you are not going forward. You are still thinking in one dimension. You should start thinking in two dimensions...
Pressing the view all comments, I really want to see all comments at once, at the moment I only get more comments per page which is certainly not what I wanted when I pressed the button.
To me the point of having a larger screen or desktop area is to have several webpages visible at once (each window about 800px wide), NOT for one webpage to be so large it takes up the entire width of one screen. The new design is too big with too much padding and spacing everywhere: wasteful.
A good design should wrap intelligently so it doesn't actually matter what the width is. Ditch fixed width, have a look at some advanced CSS properties that allow you to wrap article-blocks in a flow that adapts to the browser width. The Dailytech column can be a div element with float:right, for instance.
I am sorry if this has been addressed already, but at the time of writing there are 197 comments. Can we have a print option. I know that it might not be benefitial to you from an advertizing point of view but I work on a lappy all day and sometimes I like to print a hard copy when I get home.
p.s. How about a spellcheck in the comment section?
As I type, I see my comment coming up in light gray text on whitish background. When will this fad of light text on light backgrounds get run off the net and computer screens (thanks Microsoft-NOT)? Did anyone think to contact the graphic experts (font makers, legibility experts) or did they just go directly to the marketing department ? BLACK text on 90% white/light gray background is very legible and doesn't cause eye strain like the light blue/light gray text. Column width should be (according to the experts, not marketing) approximately one and a half alphabets wide for maximum ease of reading if I remember correctly. A sans-serif font is also harder to read than a serif font. I can not believe how sheep-like the internet is! Everyone raced to see who could become the hardest to read using light blue font colors. Its insane. Please go for comfort and legibility over fadishness. The principles of communicating using text attributes has been thoroughly researched. Please make use of it or get a web designer that does.
I second Sebec "I kind of liked the old design better, where you could see the most recent article headlines all at once, rather than having to scroll. I find it to be a hassle."
But if you must be modern - I won;t complain too much for the info on the site is Top Notch!
Be kind if I am stupid, but why must the link from 'Latest from AnandTech' open in a new Tab? Can I choose for in go open in the same Tab, like most sites do? If I want to open the link in a New Tab, I can always chose to do so by right clicking in FireFox.
I'd like to see the site dynamically resize itself for whatever resolution/window size I happen to be using. Or at least give us a few options for common screen widths. I think it's safe to say the majority of us that visit AnandTech don't browse the web with a 1024x768 window and it would be nice to be able to use more of my screen real estate since a good potion of the page is used up already by ridiculously large and tacky ads.
I don't like the auto scrolling deal for the new/featured articles. I guess if you must auto scroll them, at least give some indication of how old they are... if I load the page and don't have my eye on it immediately after loading, I don't know which article is the newest.
I also don't like that the DailyTech articles are all smashed together now. The date separators were handy to skip over stuff I've already looked at or decided I didn't want to look at and see what's new.
Dunno if I'm just old and set in my ways, but I dislike this style of layout... I'm not a fan of it on other sites either... I liked the at a glance navigation of the old site... Everything was just there, but not in the way... Everything seems so... Large.... on both my 23" monitor at 1680X1050 and especially, as expected, on my lcd tv at 1366 X768...
I also dislike that I can't read the Dailytech headlines without scrolling...
I don't think I ever really navigated the website using the topic buttons really... Unless I was searching for something specific, like an old video card review... It may help casual readers though, but since I tend to read everything... They just seem to take up a lot of space...
Either way, I don't come here for Dailytech, Twitter feeds, or shiny graphics... I come here for what I've been coming here for since 1998 when I first found it... The great articles...
So if this is how Anand and the crew want it "modernized" So be it... As long as the great reviews are SOMEWHERE to be found on the site... I'll come back...
..Like the sea but in reverse. And the dark voids on the sides? It looks like Anandtech was plucked from its cozy and light home and dropped into the sea. Or in space. I do not fancy it.
yes, this new site is flashier and has nice colors, but that doesn't make it better. I liked the old site better because the speed with which I could view the new articles on the page without having to scroll through them. No it doesn't take much time to scroll through, but it also causes me to spend less time here, and head to the other pages like Tom's, daily tech and tech report because I get a summary of the page on my first screen.
It's just an opinion, and there's nothing wrong with liking the old site.
The new layout is amazing. I like it. But, there is something i'm missing. Where's the menu print article. I'm usually use menu print article to view the article in one page to read it later, so i don't need to click the page one by one. Please active the print article...!
Way too much scrolling required for navigating. Pictures are too large and there is generally a lot of wasted white and blue space. Time to go back to the drawing board and tighten-up things I am afraid.
like the graphical layout - 2 things I miss Daily Tech links: old site had date separators; made it easy to see where you last read the links Reading an article: at the bottom of the first page there was a "Print this article" link that popped open a new window with the complete article in it in a printer friendly format. It also allowed you to read the whole article without having to click to see the next page.
Personally, I find scrolling a mobile device to be undesirable and have little interest in trying to absorb information dense content on a mobile device. Therefore the positive comments about mobile devices mean nothing to me. I was happy with the old site.
That said, there were two features on the old website that made it easy for me to get around that are missing. The first is that in stories that are more than one page, you had an index and I could skip to whichever page I wanted to go to. Personally, I do a lot of that. These days, when I read non-fiction, I read the introduction and the last chapter and, after that, decide whether or not I will read any more. I have done that a lot with AnandTech articles. Please bring it back.
The other feature that is missing (from my perspective) was that you always grouped the Dailytech stories by date. I do not always to get a whole day's stories on one day and I used that guideline by remembering that I was one day behind, or maybe two days behind. I cannot do that any more.
Overall the look is good, but I much prefer to read reviews in the printable version rather than page through every single page. I presume it would be reasonably easy to put a "Printable version" link in?
awful! terrible! a good pack of excellent ideas wrapped up in the worst format ever . I usinga 30"and guess what? i can not read all the new articles, must painfully scrool down bit by bit to get a glimpse.
and way too many color borders. it probably has some positive side, but it is lost in the sea of scrolling. keep it beta, maybe using the new color identity with the old format?
To me it looks just like the maximum pc website with different colors. Naturally times change and new things come along and at one point or another everything goes through a refresh. I personally liked the old design and it grew on me, it was a "WTH" moment for me when I ran into the new design today.
Any chance to get the dailytech news topics separated by date? Now they're all grouped together, before they you could at least tell which ones were from today or yesterday.
apart form the reviews and other stuff been norm very good, why remove the Print option it was very good thing to have now i have to press next on every page (guru3d site is the Worst for it 20-30 pages of having to press next)
and due to the comments fasterbrowser addon does not work with your site to compensate for no Pint button (comments really need to have its Own page)
Hi, as always, Anandtech is a great website with some of the best technical content available on the Web.
Having said that, clicking through multiple pages is usually a pain (especially when reading an article over lunch or similar) and I took shameless advantage of the old web-site's 'Print' function to view articles as lovely continuous single pages.
Please bring that functionality back, or some other single-page analogue. I miss being able to just 'spacebar' or 'PageDown' through an entire multi-page article.
... you get screwed up: just a generic error message, no article at all. And the same with links INSIDE the article ("check our previous article ____").
PLEASE, do us (and perhaps YOU, Anandtech) a favor and fix / redirect the old URL system, so "SHOWDOC.ASPX", "PRINTARTICLE.ASPX" and the old article numbers ("3382", etc.) work... with WHATEVER design you want.
Could you please separate the DailyTech news by date? So that when I return the next day I don't have to try to remember what I already saw yesterday and feel strange when I read some news a second time ;)
The scrolling needed to find articles takes too much time. I wish Anandtech would keep the good functionality of the old layout which was to show more articles without much scrolling on the home and head pages. Then add the look of the new layout/design for eye candy. Thanks.
Hi, It seems harder to quickly see everything that is available. I don't like the pictures/articles thing that rotates at the top. It takes too long to see what is there.
Toms Hardware came off my set of home pages when they did something like this a few years ago. I'll have to see what happens with this one. Right now, it looks like Tom's packs more information into less space. I might put that page next to this one and see which one survives.
I don't have a lot of time. If it isn't efficient, I just won't come here as much.
Ditch the carousel at the top. I don't want to deal with that stuff, just show me a graphical overview like you used to.
I'd also love to see the actual content column (the one the articles are in) widened. But maybe that's just me being tired of wasting around half of my 1920 horizontal pixels.
I miss the printable view. Is this feature coming back at a latter date? Even if it is not used to kill trees, it is useful if I want to have the article available in an offline mode. Maybe a download this article in PDF function would be cool too.
I, like most of you readers mostly use widescreen. I have an extra half million pixels that aren't telling me something or distracting my eyes. I guess this will fill up with adds over time.
Great design. Although I too would like more of screen used. Right now there's about a quarter unused on the sides on my 1680x1050 widescreen. Also the page header + carousel are so big that I only see the title of the first article. Though I suppose shortening the header would make it less visually appealing. Don't really know.
I do have one other tidbit: The carousel is fantastically slow on firefox. A 2 - 3 FPS slideshow (when sliding to show other article thumbs). While on IE 8 it's perfectly smooth. I haven't gone so far as to check how you made it, but I'm guessing JavaScript + CSS. Could you please take some time to see if you can make it work faster on FireFox? I'm guessing firefox recalculates too much (something like the whole page) with current implementation. Perhaps a different approach that would fool the browser into thinking that nothing much has actually changed in that particular section of the page?
- Please add a "print" feature or some other way to get the entire article on one page. I often read Anandtech on my mobile with Opera Mini and it's annoying and slow to have to navigate between pages. - The RSS feed isn't made available from every page - I have to manually click on the RSS / MOBILE link to get it. This is different from most sites. - I much prefer sites that aren't fixed-width - if I have a wide screen, why can't the content fill it?
Please, for the love of all that is good, bring back the print view. Put adverts every few inches if you want, but let me view an entire story on one page.
Why is the body text a shade of GREY rather than black?! It's horrid on the eyes and almost like you're deliberately trying to make it faint and hard to read.
I like the fact that it's simple, but just not feeling it.. Sorry... If the design isn't finalized, I wouldn't mind even doing a concept design for you at no charge..
The new look feels refreshing, got one suggestion, could u keep the widen page / larger font options? Cos it would be more comfortable on a 24' or larger monitors. Thanks guys for the update anyway :)
I was a frequent reader of Anandtech because of excellent contents but this new design with 'Print article' function dropped, looks like I would have to stop coming to this site. Print article functions saves me a lot of time and useful if I want to switch between pages. I wonder why Anand dropped this function. Only a few online sites left with print article function and one of them is Tom's.
The possibility of reading the whole article without the tiring exercise of clicking and clicking again like if readers would have been punished and obliged to suffer Tantalus torture is gone. Not a good and rational decision if you wanted to improve your site. Your new design is irrelevant. You have taken the opportunity to make a change in favor of propaganda thinking readers must be stupid.
I don't like the fact that the logo has conformed to the whole liquid candy like style that has taken hold of many other web online sites. The comet doesn't even look like a comet anymore but rather one of those lobbing trajectory missiles.
I've been coming to Anandtech for over a decade. There was nothing wrong with the old site! It was simple and familiar, just the way it should be and it should have stayed this way. I don't like the new design and it doesn't add anything at all to the site, on the contrary. The scrolling bar on top is hideous btw. The content is all that matters! Never mind all this nonsens about the "brand new look and feel". Bring back my "old", trusty Anandtech!
when I get home after a long day I check the forums and open Anandtech. But until I actually get to take a look at the page some time passed. At that point the new article scrolling bar is in a random position and I can't immediately see what's new. Sure, I could still scroll down and take a look at the actual articles, but the "get all important information at a glance" is gone :(
Additionally: is the "new articles since last visit" gone? I found this to be useful, especially if there were more than 1 new articles.
17 clicks to see 17 screens to see all the headlines, banners, graphics, text samples etc., just to see what you might want to actually read. Then at the bottom of the entire first page I find out there are 181 pages. Let's see. 17 clicks X 181 pages.....no, I've got better things to do. This isn't user friendly or effective previewing of the website's content at all. It's a pain in the rear. Put up a simple list, by category perhaps, of the article titles and assume users are bright enough to perhaps recognize what they might want to read. KISS, KISS, KISS. AnandTech was uniquely good before precisely because it provided lots of content efficiently. Now that some of the worst practices of graphic designers from the rest of the world have been adopted it kinda looks like the rest of the world, i.e. it doesn't impress as a better site to visit.
it has its pros and cons obviously but its a shame... now there really is nothing to appreciate about this site anymore and to keep me coming back to it.
The AnandTech title bar, the links right below, the featured stories slide, and post pictures are huge!
My recommendations/preferences are: 1 .Reduce the height of the blank space for title and links right below, 2. Reduce the featured stories pictures by 30-40% (Height and width), remove the slider (lags Firefox atm), and fit 4, 5, 6 stories there 3. Reduce the height of the story pictures by half (wide angle shots, you can still get a lot of detail) 4. Change "Latest from AnandTech" to "Latest from DailyTech", remove DAILYTECH from same section. 5. W3C Strict instead of transition (yeah I know, not likely)
Thanks for reading my comments Anandtech, I love the new design and color scheme.
For the most part... my browser isn't getting cookies or whatever so it knows the password to this site... so every few posts or a restart (after rebooting/starting PC) of Opera 10.5, I have to constantly log-in.
The Site looks better. The logo on top is kinda odd.
I guess the huge menu is more for iPhones & other smart phones... but it seems difficult to find new articles... what is not seen on the first screen is lost... so if you add 2-3 articles on a single day, we might not know about it.
It seems to me like the things in the main column on your home page should be just that, "main". The Just-In is nice but you might want to consider putting it in its own section somewhere else on the home page. I constantly see the stuff that is just in, which is nice to know what you're working on, but it adds to the amount of time it takes to find the full articles. The Just-In titles tend to take up too much space for just a short notification of what is sitting in your labs and in the end just clutter your space. I like the idea behind it but not the way it was executed.
I am also against the large scrolling thumbnails at the top. They take a long time to scroll even if you specifically click on the arrows to move through them. Also if you just skip that and scroll down you get the benefit of seeing basically a short summary so you know what the article is focused on. I know you really liked the idea of it but that doesn't always mean it is the best thing to do.
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Cali3350 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Since a large portion of all of this is obviously still Beta is it possible to access the old portal while the kinks are worked out?The new design will take some getting used to from my point of view - First reaction is its not terrible, which is a good thing :)
retrospooty - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
"Since a large portion of all of this is obviously still Beta is it possible to access the old portal while the kinks are worked out? The new design will take some getting used to from my point of view - First reaction is its not terrible, which is a good thing :) "Are you that stuck in a rut thtat you cant just view the new site as is? Is it REALLY that difficult that you require a portal to the old layout? Seriously, get a grip.
All that aside, I like the new site - it pops out at ya... Much improved and absolutely no reason to to back to the old.
MonkeyPaw - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
It's already a more mobile-friendly design, and Anand has already hinted that mobile browsing could be in the "raodmap."fixxxer0 - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
maybe mobile friendly... but definitely definitely NOT remote desktop friendly. the animated flash ads that are all over the site lock up the remote console when you get to an ad. such a pain since i use remote to browse (to bypass web filters and such).old site had no such problem.
djc208 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
If he's like me it could be these newfangled sites wreak havoc with the ancient IE6 at work. Locked up IE completely when I tried to view this article at work (of course I only surf the internet at lunch ;-) Had to use task manager to shut it down.Vimono - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Really? I've been using IE6 and I haven't had a problem yet.djc208 - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
It's fine on the home page, but for some reason opening the articles just locks up IE6. I can see the page but I can't scroll. I've found if I leave it sit for a few minutes it eventually loads the page but it can take five or ten minutes for this to happen. It's only in the articles though, no problem seeing or navigating the home page.We're supposed to be going to IE7 (Yay, only one generation behind, for now) but who knows when that will happen.
Cali3350 - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
I didnt mean to in anyway undervalue nor disrespect Anand or the team here at the site. When the site initially went online I found a few broken links and missing tags, and was curious if the old portal was still available. These issues all seem to be fixed now (except for the comments 'next' tag still taking me to the bottom of the page).ctrlbrk - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Anand, great job for you and your team. It looks great, I really like the colors and larger images...Mike
Glenn - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I agree! Anandtech has come a long way from the geocities days, huh?ScorcherDarkly - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Whoa...I like it.Sebec - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I kind of liked the old design better, where you could see the most recent article headlines all at once, rather than having to scroll. I find it to be a hassle. Also the giant banner ad right above the AnandTech logo looks rather tacky.Makaveli - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I didn't even notice the banner Firefox and ad block :PBut ya I agree the placement could be better so much unused space on the left and right side of the screen maybe you could move it there.
boobtoober - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Yo, if you like this site you should consider whitelisting it. You're not supporting Anandtech by running Adblock...erple2 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Does the site get revenues from viewed ads, or from clicked on ads? That's something that only Anand and company can really answer. In which case, is a blocked ad worse than a non-clicked ad?I suspect that the answer is "a bit of both". I suspect that ads that are shown are worth some small amount, ads that are clicked on are worth more, and ads that lead to a "sale" are worth even more.
that is all pure speculation, however.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
First and foremost, the most important part is that you support the site by reading the content. I appreciate everyone who does that. So, thank you :)The majority of our ads are not paid for on a per click basis, it's per view. The more views we can offer, the more appealing we are to advertisers. We have strict policies against popups or other obnoxious ads. If there's ever something you see that really bothers you, please email me directly with a screengrab and I'll take a look at it ([email protected]).
The choice to block ads is entirely up to you. Regardless of whether or not you do, I still value you tremendously as a reader. It helps us if you don't but I understand the reason why some do. It's your choice but I value you the same regardless of your decision :)
Take care,
Anand
BZDTemp - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Nice no BS answer I can respect. I always though that only ad click really counted but since it is not so I'm gonna whitelist anandtech right away. (does this mean I get more say with regards to the new design - just kidding).Voo - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
That's a great response but as a fellow reader I really think deactivating Adblock is one small way to help such an awesome site and I personally think that's very much worth it.totenkopf - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Wow. I appreciate such a stand-up, honest approach. By the way, classy place you run here, Anand. I also like the new look. I loved being able to see all the latest articles without having to scroll, but realistically, I'm here everyday so it's not all that necessary. I'll make sure to give ol' Anandtech a plug everytime I get the chance. Thanks for everything, guy!ptrinh1979 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I thought about that space on the left and right too, until my gut instinct told me it could be there because the site would also need to accommodate users who may not be viewing the site on a widescreen device, or those who may not have their browser window maximized (windows 7 winkey+left/right arrow). So i tried both scenarios - I thought the site looked really good in both scenarios - no wasted space on the left or right sides.Vimono - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Exactly. Unfortunately, from my understanding, the standard screen you still need to accommodate for these days is 1024x768. I blame the corporate market! *shakes fists*tnygwek - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I too liked the old design.As you said, it was easier to see the most recent articles head lines all at once.
And the small text below the pictures at the top was nice. May be the text of a picture could appear/unfold below its title when moving the cursor on that picture.
Otherwise, as far as I have seen, the new look is nice.
JimmiG - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
A "most recent articles" section would have been nice. Lots of scrolling to gather all the most recent reviews.Vimono - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
"A "most recent articles" section would have been nice. Lots of scrolling to gather all the most recent reviews. "Doesn't the carousel hold the latest/most recent articles? You shouldn't need to do any scrolling at all :)
nevbie - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
agreed1. I don't want to scroll my screen in order to see article topics, the more I can see instantly after opening the front page, the better.. up to some limit, but the old one was not too full. I do not want to do many actions.
2. Rotation in flash is BAD, because it takes time and requires actions (overly complicated). You get bigger buttons for the articles, but that has little value. It is better to have less area for recent articles, and get more articles in the same space.
Mr Perfect - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
Yes, what is it exactly that the carousel does? Does it simply show the 5 newest articles posted on the front page? Or will it also hold unique content that hasn't been pushed down to the main list, kind of how the old layout did? Because at this point I'm just skipping over the damn thing and reading the front page listings underneath it. It's faster then watching the carousel slide by or manually clicking though it. Which, naturally, makes it kind of pointless.Mr Perfect - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
Ok, after watching it over the course of the week, the carousel seems to do nothing more then slowly cycle through the five newest articles on the front page. Isn't that somewhat redundant? Those same articles are directly below it.I don't want to sound like I'm harping on the new design though, because the rest of the site is very clean looking.
FlameDeer - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Congratulations to all of you in AnandTech team! After years of hard works, this up to date nice looking new design is finally here. Hope that AnandTech will become better & better, take care :)ctrlbrk - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
New logo is truly fantastic, well done.Also -- people hardly ever welcome change, but change is a necessary part of life. :)
Mike
Rasterman - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
The new logo is awesome, but the whole top area is way too big vertically! The logo and nav buttons make up almost 400 vertical pixels, not even including a banner ad, thats way too much.Nafets - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Any chance of implementing the "page width/expansion" button that was on the old Anandtech site. I have lots of blue border space on the right and left. This results in more up/down scrolling, from all the wasted space on the sides. My resolution is at 1600x1200....ctrlbrk - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I agree, I used that too as I am running 1600x1050 and have four monitors, so I usually browse full screen on one of them. It would be nice to be able to make the page wider to fill the gap.Mike
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Keep the requests coming, it helps us to hear what you guys want :) We're going to be updating this a lot over the coming weeks and months so let your voice be heard!Take care,
Anand
T2k - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Seconded... let the stuff use my 24" a bit more...Rasterman - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
What would be awesome is a side by side page format, having 1 page 1920 wide is too wide, which is why newspapers use columns of text, it looks better and is easier to read. Having 2 or 3 pages side by side would be awesome and very fast to read.mariush - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Actually, widening the text would be bad ... an option to switch to TWO columns of text of let's say 500 pixels would be great.... I'm sure you know lots of readers have over 1680 pixels width, a lot 1920x1080 , so two x 500 px wouldn't be two big of a stretch i think....sanjeev - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Count me in here for the same request.Also the comments cascading seems to make the text area longer and longer vertically. so ,say after 100 replys will the last comment display 1char or word per line?
And here are my views.
1 LOOKs FRESH.
2. ..mmm seems similar to hothardware.
3.on 1680*1050 and 1920*1080- looks ok. but on 1280*960 - all i can see is BIG navigation bars/menu and equally BIG LOGO -nothhing else (
4.I liked the orange Moustache on the old logo.This Moustache is kind of - dull.(my opnion )
Makaveli - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I like the new design I find it makes articles easier to read after a long day. Colours are also great can't wait to see it out of beta.Excellent Job!
haplo602 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I thought I misstyped the url today. the new layout looks great and much better than the old one.however there are some quirks to work on (I am writing this comment without actualy seeing the article or previous comments, so I have no clue where it will post).
FrankSchwab - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
and, frankly, looks great even with no-script running (a rarity on new website designs).Congratulations, and thanks.
/frank
macs - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
No more "print button" to see the whole article in one page?please, I need it :-(
Anyway, the site looks great! Congratulations!
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Crap! The Print function is there, it's just hidden right now. The widget it is a part of has some additional functionality that's not enabled right now. I'll try to get it enabled asap though, I know a lot of folks use it!Take care,
Anand
Rasterman - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I totally agree, this is the #1 reason I use your site over Toms Hardware, 1 page reading is a MUST.kb9fcc - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I second that! After the initial jar of seeing the new layout the first thing I noticed was the lack of the print button. I too enjoy reading the whole articles on a single page as I can scroll back and forth as I please to suit my reading style.The second control or button I thought this site had was a width button which allowed a wider view of the pages especially on wide screen monitors. I don't even have one on this computer and almost 40% of the screen is wasted in grey borders with a thin strip left in the middle for content. (of which a 1/3 is consumed by the right sidebar). It would look ok on a monitor in portrait mode, but that's not an option here.
Anand, you have a great site. I come here first for tech news and reviews and check the "others" later because the content is great and easy to access. Keep up the good work!
btkcsd - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
Could you please make the new print button not explicitly resize the new window but use the same window size as the original page?Testeo - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
The print button is (for me) one of the reasons that makes the diference with others tech sites, I NEED view the articles in one single page for analize yours excelents reviewsScifiterX - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
The good: it is easier to read and navigation appears pretty straight forward.The bad: it looks to far too similar to so many other tech sites
imachip - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Just want to say thanks for all your efforts Anand and team for making it my favourite tech site on the internet. It's nice to hear you still enjoy publishing articles after all these years, so long may it continue :)GeorgeH - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Overall it's a very, very nice look. Even being so used to the old layout, I was almost instantly comfortable with the new one, which is a great sign and shows the quality of the design.There are some incredibly minor things that I would personally tweak, but only one worth mentioning; the lack of any break between the vertical list of articles is a little jarring. Something very subtle (like ArsTechnica's line of dots) might work well without breaking the excellent "clean" aesthetic you've got going.
Zaitsev - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I agree with having a minor break between articles. I think it would contribute to the 'clean look.'eli2k - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Hmm, I suddenly miss the old design, but we have to move forward eventually, right?I like the larger font; makes it easier on the eyes. The header portion (logo, search box, etc) has too much space on top/bottom. I'm not too cool with the review box scrolling on its own, does anyone else feel this way? And I agree with some other comments here that I have to scroll a lot to get to the next story on the front page, eg one story takes up the entire height of my browser window
KaarlisK - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I second that - there could be less space between the row with the logo/home/about/forums/etc and the row with cpus/motherboards/ssds/etc.It also seems to me that there's too much space around "Follow Anandtech".
NullSubroutine - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
1) When making comments it takes you to a page where you can no longer see the other comments. When responding to someone unless you copy and paste everything they say it is easy to misquote them or even just forget what they are saying.2) No real real estate gained for the articles, if anything the articles feel just as narrow as the old ones.
3) the text and arrangement of the articles feel less polished and professional. I'm not quite sure what it is, but it just looks like a big wall of text when looking at the Fermi article
Zaitsev - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
It would be nice to be able to view the comment or thread we're replying to. It's a little annoying to have to click between tabs to see the other posters' text.Hacp - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
This lags a little on my netbook.Christoph Katzer - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
The best is the front page navigation that dates back 13 years !!!mjzglr - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Long time lurker. Just registered to post this. Since I visited the site daily I could look over at the Dailytech section and the article section and know what was new. Now in order to do that I have to scroll and scroll and scroll vertically down the page, or very slowly horizontally in the giant preview windows. It's a big disappointment in my mind since it makes finding content a lot slower which is all I cared about anyway.B3an - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
If you need to scroll that much, you should just get a monitor with a remotely decent res. As it sounds like you're using 800x600 or something.For me i dont have to scroll to see all the DT stuff on the right.
HotFoot - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I have the same issue with the Dailytech list of headlines. I liked them up where they used to be, right under the box that listed the new articles on Anandtech that I hadn't yet read. Those two boxes were the fastest way for me to find what I was looking for - fresh articles.The social-networking business that's taken that space now isn't something I plan on using - though I'm sure others will find it handy.
On the other hand, the site currently uses about 50% of the width of my screen (1920x1200). Maybe more content could be brought to the front where a viewer will see it without having to scroll down. I say maybe because I can also appreciate having a non-cluttered look.
Another point on site width - I actually like the articles coming out as columns about the width they are now. I don't like reading a mile-long string of text before hitting the next line. I think the article text field width has been pretty good so far, so please don't change that.
Cheers!
txriddle - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
Agree with the poster- too much white space and not enough information.I'm using a 24" 1920x1200 and I prefer to have fewer expanses of white space that I have to scroll through.
It's inevitable that tech sites seem to feel the need to adopt advertising industry design standards.
GREAT site, btw, and a regular stop for the best technical analyses- however, it's a step backwards, in my opinion, for a site that has a lot of info to present...
To each his own-
I felt the same way about Tom's Hardware when they changed their format and I find I seldom visit that site anymore.
B3an - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Being a webdesigner myself, i can say you've done a good job. It looks a lot better, cleaner, and more up to date.Would like the option to expand the middle section though, like with the old site.
B3an - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Oh and i'd also like to add, the DT and Twitter section on the right is too wide. So while the mid section is wider on a whole, the actual article space is the same (or maybe even less?).The article area needs to be wider. But like i say above, having the option to change the mid section size like with the old site will fix this anyway.
falc0ne - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I entered this morning...opened the site from bookmarks so I knew it the address is correct and :O)..I remained huh?! :)) Maybe the logo and menus could be slightly smaller...but then again I'm using an 1280x1024 native resol now and I think more use 1680x1050 or even 1920x1080..and for them probably looks OK..all in one the change is welcomed
Zaitsev - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I realize this is beta. Just my first impressions.The new design is stunning. The colors are MUCH easier on the eyes. The scrolling pics at the top is wonderful eyecandy, but I think the transition after a click could be more snappy.
I still think there should be a wide format option (am I missing it?). Those with widescreen displays should have the option to show more content, pictures and text if they desire:)
I'm a fan of the twitter section, and new logo! It's obvious you all put some thought into the layout and color schemes. Try not to dwell on the anti-change crowd. Cheers!
ltcommanderdata - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
In general I like the new look and color scheme. It's much more modern.My main concern is the size of the header and menus which seem to take up vertically half of a 1440x900 screen so it takes more scrolling than needed to get to the actual content. As others have mentioned, I think the gap between the Anandtech logo and Home/About/etc menu and the CPUs/Motherboards/etc categories can be reduced. I think the categories themselves are kind of big, especially the orange secondary categories which seem to be small text floating in a sea of orange. The excess vertical space bordering the primary and secondary category text could probably be trimmed. That's my preference anyways.
T2k - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
I agree, the header is HUUUUGEEE....ant_ - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I gotta say I am not a big fan of these changes. The main page reads like a blog now. There is just too much information thrown in my face. I would rather have a simple short paragraph and a picture explaining the article/review being linked.NMDJuggler - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Love the new look. Minor suggestion, when scrolling between pages of comments, it leaves you at the bottom of the next page, which doesn't make a lot of chronological sense. You could either anchor the link it to the top of the comments on the new page or provide a link to switch pages at the top and bottom of the comments (think Google).kahwaji_n - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Very nice Design, But where the Print article Option gone?borys991 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I second that, Print Article option is very important to me as well, it saves lot of time while reading article. Can we have it back please?General layout is pretty nice but it will definitely take some time to get use to.
thx
borys
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
The print option is coming! Give us another day or two. It got pulled out at the last minute, but not permanently :)Take care,
Anand
BanditWorks - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Congratulations on meeting the self-imposed Q1 '10 deadline AnandTech! Just need to update the favicon to the new logo and I would say that you guys are good to go! <3T2k - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
...perhaps it's U2410's my wide-gamut mode?damianrobertjones - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I 'really' like the changes and as long as the damn ads stay safe with no re-directions, this will stay as my premium tech page :)piroroadkill - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
The header logo is too big, furthermore, there's too much wasted vertical space (category buttons have massive white space around them) and, there is too much wasted horizontal space, and there's too much duplication (that silly thing near the top that you can click left and right to scroll through the stories? Yeah, ditch it, total waste of space, since it's horribly slow to navigate).I liked the way the old design had the most important stories in a clear layout at the top with a brief description, and the blog type posts would never clutter this area.
All the images on the page are too big, and it just feels like I'm scrolling forever to get anywhere near the same amount of content on the screen as before.
You can see the problem right there in your own screenshot: the old design, 6 articles at one time, and it doesn't look cluttered (although it could use stretching to fit horizontally, too), and the new design, 3, and one of them is shown twice(!)
I have nothing against a redesign if it offers a cleaner and nicer way to view things, but.. this isn't it.
Nickel020 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Second that. even on my 24" about 1/3 of the vertical page is taken up by the header, that's too much. I can barely see one extra article.And the "teaser texts" + "cover pic" for the older articles are also to big, I need to scroll too much to get an overview over al the latest articles. It's a good thing though to be able to read the full teaser texts actually, it has always annoyed me to read half of the text on the front page, click on the article and not find it here!? (I know I can read it by going to the articles category, but that's not exactly good web design to force a user to take a detour just to read the teaser).
So make the pics smaller, cut down on the teaser text AND finally start putting that teaser text on the first page of your articles. Please?
But maybe keep showing articles in the carousel and the main column, I like that I have ALL the articles in a chronological order there.
And a link to the blogs is missing, where are the tabs below the carousel?
Overall I like it though, even though it feels like a big change. All the other updates over the eight years I've been coming here were really minor and never changed the feel of the site like this, but if you do it right the site could be better in every single way :)
PS: Are you using a custom CMS or one of the usual suspcts? I'm still too much of a newbie to figure that out by the source...
samspqr - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
the new layout is quite easy on the eyes, I like it, and that means it's truly great, because it usually takes me some time to start to like such changesanyway, just a couple of things I don't like:
* keep the horizontal section with the latest articles stationary; I don't want it to scroll through the latest aditions, and, at the least, I don't want it to do so by itself (if you want to keep the scroll there, at least put a "pause" button somewhere, and let the cookie remember I want it stationary)
* the "next" button in the comments section takes you to the END of the next page of comments, while it should be (and used to be) the beginning
semo - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I like the comments section and how you can view all posts. Easier to follow your own thread and see that questions and comments about the relevant articles are ignored.Werelds - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Here's the web developer in me popping up!From a UX point of view, the navigation is pretty good. The guy above me mentions "Too much whitespace" - totally wrong. The use of whitespace is actually good, as it distinguishes between the various content.
Good colour scheme as well, well done to whoever came up with that!
Now, some criticism:
- The frontpage is definitely worse; the intros shown now are much longer, and you don't get a quick glance at what's new. My suggestion would be to add a headline box above the actual listing.
- Minor, but you should really make the comments hard linked instead of pure AJAX. I know it looks cool, but it's horrible from a user point of view as the back button doesn't work anymore for example. Easy fix though; in the click handler, relocate the user to currenturl#pageid - catch that pageid on page load as well, and you can properly hardlink again, with all the benefits of back/forward buttons and whatnot.
- The ad at the top has to be relocated. I know you thrive on ads partially, but your webdevelopers should really read up on some studies from the past few years. Ads are generally overlooked, unless interwoven with content; the one to the right is placed well, because it's constantly in view. Google for "website eyetracking" or "website heatmaps" to find some extracts from and tips based on these studies.
- < and > aren't allowed in posts, brackets or accolades around a word that isn't a valid BB tag also crash the app, might want to write alternative code for that ;)
Werelds - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
An edit button would be great as well :PHad to adjust the content of my comment like 5 times before it would parse; and I see HTML entities aren't parsed :(
zagood - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
description meta tag (and keyword but not as important)Once Google/Bing etc. re-index the site you'll want to have that set up.
RaistlinZ - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I like the design! :)Dennis Travis - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I really like it. Very nice. Only thing right now I can't find is the My Anandtech and my system rigs.Keep up the great work. Looks great.
at80eighty - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
It's cleaner & the gradient background is so much easier on the eyes. also Ive always wanted to view all comments in one page.great work Anand & crew!
at80eighty - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
hm just noticed, when you expand the comments on long threads the background becomes solid again - any way to keep the gradient while scrolling too?semo - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I thought that feature was good but now it seems that you get 50 posts per page max. Still, much better than before where your post might be on page 2 one day and 4 the next.Lonyo - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
It's nice, in theory, but I like to be able to see more stories.Having massive pictures, massive amounts of text on the summary/preview etc, it feels like a cheap blog.
I want to be able to see much more content without having to scroll. Surely people are going to be less likely to click on things if they have to scroll a lot?
On my 1280x800 laptop screen, the only thing I can see is the 3 articles in the carousel. That's it. I have to do a lot of scrolling to see anything further back than that, or to see any of the recent article text summaries (which are too long).
The scheme is nice. The ideas are nice. The execution IMO sucks unless you are running a 30" monitor in portrait mode.
Everything needs to be smaller and more compact so more is viewable on the screen, like it used to be.
For instance, change the carousel so each image is smaller, and maybe make it 4 wide or so by default. Reduce the space around the categories so they don't take up such a large proportion of the screen.
At the moment it goes:
Gap
Banner
Gap
Headers/logo
Gap
Categories
Gap
Carousel
Gap
Titles (Latest Post/Follow AT)
Title (of most recent article)
Small Gap
ACTUAL WRITTEN CONTENT. JACKPOT.
E
x
c
e
s
s
i
v
e
l
y
L
o
n
g
S
u
m
m
a
r
y
ARTICLE TITLE NUMBER TWO
SECOND LOT OF CONTENT! JACKPOT!
Devo2007 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Site definitely looks impressive. Nice job!i am actually looking at the page using Opera Mobile 10 on a Samsung Omnia II and was surprised to see how fast it loaded - even the carousel. I am using HSPA, not Wi-Fi so that is even more impressive for a design that looks modern like this.
Only main display glitch is a white box at the top right obscuring the Bench item and anything to the right (though the search bar is present).
I realize mobile access probably isn't a priority but overall it still seems to work well. Awesome job!
SunLord - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
The last page of an article needs a home button like the last version had I don't want to have to scroll back to the top just to leave an article.529th - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
AWESOME!!!NaughtyGeek - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Uhg, I cringed when TGDaily went to this style and now here we are at AnAnd. ICK!hko45 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Articles are more attractively displayed. BUT, you really need a quicker navigation option. I want to be able to see in one glance whether there's anything I'm interested in, and then to jump to it.lordmetroid - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I am missing the print this article link that would combine all pages of an article into one. Please add it again.MengNa - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
First of, congratulations on the overhaul! It's very nice and easy on the eyes.I have a small question for everyone, what is this banner ad on top everyone keep referring to? Is it the blank space above the AnandTech logo? 'cause I don't see any ad up there.
Also, I have a couple of suggestions:
1) In the comments it would be nice to have the buttons to choose which page of comments I'm viewing on top as well as the bottom.
2) When I do click on the next page of the comments it should anchor to the first comment and not stay at the bottom, which makes you scroll all the way to the top to read them.
3) I'd like to see the comments numbered, so I could find certain comments more easily.
Thanks!
sitswithmouse - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Like the new look, but just like some others have posted, please bring back the Print Article option.Please!
yacoub - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
So much wasted space now :(This new design is pretty poor from a screen real estate perspective. Why is there so much wasted space around everything?
Sorry but it looks amateurish.
yacoub - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
And yeah, it does look less professional now, aside from the new logo which looks nice.The harsh color contrasts (the orange submenu bar for example).
The lack of a simple, straightforward, cohesive menu/nav, replaced by two rows of disjointed, inexplicably differentiated options, plus a third row of options to the right of the menu, which sort of get lost in the header.
All the extra "space" around things really wastes efficiency and above-the-fold real estate.
DBissett - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
While there are some improvements with the "new look", the headline, rotating article teasers, bolded article titles, and ALL THE GRAPHICS are WAY TOO BIG. Especially the graphics. Not only does this kinda detract from the aesthetics of the new look, but it mandates way too much scrolling to actually read stuff. Anandtech looked better before, IMHO, because you could actually read a lot on each screen. By oversizing the graphics and bolding, it now looks like every other graphic designers inyourface idea of what a website should look like that you see around the web.Dave
yacoub - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
It can't be good when one's initial reaction to loading the site is an audible "UGH!! what the heck?!" :)log - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Much, much better! The previous one was horrendous. I actually found the version previous to 2004 better than the one you're now replacing.Congratulations!
Visual - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
You used to have a cool print article functionality that displayed the whole article on one page, making it very convenient to read. Is that gone for good now? True that it did bug out sometimes, like not displaying galleries but {{galleryblahblah}} or something, yet I will miss it.I'll probably end up making some greasemonkey script to fetch the other pages and append them to the first, but why do you want to make me go this extra trouble at all?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Nope, not gone for good :) It's a work in progress and the print function is coming back very soon :)Take care,
Anand
DBissett - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
On the article category banner....CPUs, Motherboards, etc.....why change the appearance of the second line, i.e. different type sizes and colors? This adds to the graphical clutter and messiness that are all too common. Since both lines are the same content (same level categories), how about one type size and one color? Also, why rotate 5 main article graphics? Its pointless to not allow the reader to see all five at once, unless someone just wants to demonstrate that they can do this, and it makes the reader work to see all of them by clicking the arrows. A reader can scan all 5 in 2-3 seconds and shouldn't be made to either wait or have to do something to read all of them. Like the category banner issue, the rotation just adds to graphical messiness and distraction.Dave
Moricon - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
First reactions.Where am I , oh its Anand...looks great, hey this is way better..
Well done and thank you.. Really very nicely done.
And for those with advert problems, Anandtech need adverts, its revenue and its as simple as that, we don't pay Anandtech for their hard work bringing us great reviews and content, the adverts do! If you don't like them get an ad blocker installed. I do like the Ads and have even benefited from them!
Once again, Well Done!
hindustani8 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
A good surprise to start the morning! Good work from AnandTech Team!!!cactusdog - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I really like it. It looks clean, professional and modern. It feels faster Too!!Jebzilla - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
where's the option to print the article? I have limited access at work and I like to print the articles so I can read them on break/at lunch. Love the look....it's clean and fresh.Gatos7 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I was quite used to it after all this years. The new one one looks clean though. It will take some time to get used to it but I'm sure I'm going to love it :)wharris1 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Are we still able to format the articles into a printer friendly format?holywarrior007 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Great job!!. I really like the new website. It's looks cool and it is much snappier than the older one. It's is now more pleasure to read tech related articles here.Barack Obama - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Hi Anand,I was skeptical about the site re-design, but let me be the first (or the seventy-sixth to be exact) to congratuluate you and the whole AT team on a great site re-design. I love how you have improved the comments system.
My only suggestion is to make the left and right arrows for scrolling the latest articles work when you hover over them, as opposed to clicking them each time to scroll. This would be great!
Barack Obama - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Will the Forums be re-skinned to match the main site? They look quite out of whack at the moment!timon37 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
The animation is evil, if i leave firefox with the main page visible and change the virtual desktop i get a 15% cpu usage spike every time it slides. I've got a core i7 930, linux gentoo 64bit, firefox 3.6.2 and it's the same with chromium 5.0.342.7. There most probably is no way to handle this for you since the browser might not even know it's not visible, so what I'd want is an alternative view without the animation or maybe just a standard list with shorter descriptions, honestly whatever just no js and no animations. I guess I can just forbid scripts with no-script but that creates quite a bit of wasted space and gets rid of the ads.Zkal - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Good job, like it except for the huge banner on top of the page. Can it be moved? It's annoying to have to scroll to see actual content.maloab2009 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
it seemed to display more info in the same amount of screenspace. also light colors are better than dark colors and the font sizes are too big on the new page. too much scrolling is required. what happened to the ability to print the articles?SilverBack - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Server Error in '/' ApplicationClicked on the graphics processing unit link above.
Matt_M - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I have only spent minutes with the new design so can't comment extensively. But one feature I don't see that I really liked is the ability to print an article. Not that I actually printed them out, but to me that made reading the article so much more enjoyable. To be able to scroll through the entire article on screen rather than page forward and back, or jump page-to-page. Hope you can add that feature!!!m4nm4n - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Now if you can only get a few more comment moderators to sift out the spammers, I'd be hard pressed to enjoy comments from any other tech site. The commentors here are very knowledgeable. I'd hate for their voices to be drowned out.timon37 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Also why leave the "Latest from AnandTech" with "DailyTech" and "Twitter" when viewing the article, the contents kinda feels to cramped and too offset to the left, my screen is already to the left since I have a 2 screen setup so I guess it's worse for me than others, but still when viewing an article you probably don't want to distract people from the contents itself, also it might be a good idea to make the top thinner (just when viewing articles) for people with low vertical resolution, since they have to scroll more when switching pages.timon37 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Hehehe keep in mind most of the people who say "this is could be better i can't clearly see the content, or i have to scroll to see it" are actually praising you for the content you produce;) and just want more of it, so it's not really negative feedback;pwwwcd - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Link to the old stile? I like its him! The new form not presented of Anandtech face in traditions with which we are accustomed.EdwinOlson - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Two requests:* Please restore option for printing an entire article.
* An option to show comments *only* on first/last page would be nice. Otherwise, it's too easy to overshoot the navigation popup between the articles and the comments.
jamyryals - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I like the new design. Clean and fast. Loads well on my mobile phone as well, big plus!imaheadcase - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
It would be nice if you got with the other sites that started this years ago, and actually detected size and adjusted in accordingly.Nothing like 6 inches of wasted space on each side and small text..
Sabbathian - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
First surprise in the early morning... new anandtech design :)I must say I got really used to the old one and I usually don`t like redesigns... if you ask me, you could go with the old one forever :) But, changes are needed, and here they are .... I must say that complete site haven`t lost any of its simplicity and easy to find anything design... I`m already used to it...
I have only one little remark ... top flash theme scroller is a bit slow when clicking on the arrows on the sides, nothing else:)
Thumbs up from me ;)
tnt118 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I think the redesign looks fantastic. It has a very modern feel, without the clutter or "'visual soup" so many other recent website redesigns have gone through. There's no confusion, and no sense of "where do I look?".The only thing I noticed is the "top stories" scrolling bar moves very, VERY slowly for me (Firefox 3.6) and the forums now look decidedly dated. My personal option is that the top stores shouldn't be a rotation of recent stories (those are always a very short scroll away anyways) but a promotion of the three most important stories of the last few days/weeks -- IMO, that's where AnandTech should highlight the three (and three only, no scrolling) most important/relevant stories of the entire week.
gescom - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Awesome! Applause to your designer.ViviTheMage - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I am not feeling the text for the new navigation area....and fixed width is sooo 2000.I like the new favicon! Maybe attach the favicon to the new boards as well.
mataichi - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
The site definitely needed an update. The colors and style is much improved over the old design. I agree with many that, while I do like things to be spaced and padded, there seems to be too much of it and alot of wasted real estate both vertical and horizontal.The vertical scrolling to get to articles does not bother me. This seems to be the way many sites are moving these days (engadget, joystiq, etc). Besides, probably 95% of users check this site regularly, so the articles that are farther down the page should not need to be accessed on a regular basis as they will already have been read. If they do, use the search box to find it.
Good work guys, this is much improvement, but could still use some tweaking to make it outstanding.
I realize you have to pay the bills, but obviously the ads get in the way of an ideal layout.
assemblage - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Lots of wasted space in the menu bars. Everything seems way to large.. But I guess you're optimizing it for a higher resolution than 1280x1024. I have to scroll down two big mouse wheel rolls to get to news and articles. I'll probably stop coming here as much with this design.maxfisher05 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Change is good. It will take some getting used to but I like it so far!Pirks - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Trolls use this system to downrate valid opinions, that's not fair. Without such an idiotic troll-friendly system dailytech would be much better place..fixxxer0 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
SUCK!especially since they lock up a remote desktop browser in the animation loops 9 our of 10 times.
madoc1 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
As I sometimes don't get to the site every day, or have an RSS feed to the site, it was very handy to have the articles on the left-hand "Latest from AnandTech" column to be broken up by date posted. Please consider adding this to the final format for the site.LongtimeReader11 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Dear Anand, long time reader (5 years), best reviews on the web. This is my first message, but I have to say I do not like your new design at all. IMAGES at the top are way to big, that it distracts from reading the words. all DIV spacing are massively oversized. Takes 20 seconds to scroll down the page, while only seeing one article at a time on the screen. The whole site now looks like a cheesy Word Press article.As a reader I want to see everything quick in one go and with all the information on the screen with out causing eye strain. TOM’s hardware did the same thing a couple of years ago, complete redesign and the end result was terrible I never read another article, so hard to find things and hard on the eyes, same problem here, I never went back to TOMS hardware. But time will tell on this site, say after 1 month you do notice a drop in traffic; would you consider putting back the old design? Thanks
burkeen - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I hate the new design. Sorry to be blunt, I'm sure you worked hard on it, but when I go to a site I want to know it's content. Content as in articles, words, information. Big glossy space-wasting graphics don't provide any information. This site has been part of my daily Web surfing routine for over a decade, because I could pop it up, glance over the headers and see if there was anything I wanted to read. (Key word: "read".) Now instead of glancing at the home page I have to click through some stupid carousel or scroll down pages of space. Why would you make your readers work harder to get to the articles that interest them?SergeC - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I strongly agree with this post. The new layout is very attractive, but impractical. The old one made it possible to quickly scant he page to find new items of interest. The new one requires searching around, and will result in people leaving for sites that allow them to quickly find new items of interest.gseguin - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Great work! Here's a couple of request for the technical crowd:- Would it be possible to have a "wider" layout on a click of a button? My personal resolution is 1920* and would appreciate a 1200 or 1400 px wide view of the page... according to wiki, 76% of users have > 1024* res. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_resolution
Could we get a link to browser/OS stats for your readers? You often have articles on browsers and oses, could be good to know what the browser % is from a technical site.
SilthDraeth - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Well, The site doesn't really appear any wider for me, as I have 4 inch gray bars on the side, that have nothing in them at all. Will this change? Sure I can zoom in on the site but then everything is super huge.bsantini - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I liked the old page way better. This new page takes longer to load and has less information available on one screen. The old was much more compact and efficient. I don't get why all these sites feel the need to change their homepages, first Yahoo, then Tom's, ect. It's like there is a bunch of IT guys with nothing better to do trying to justify their jobs. Please, if it ain't broke, don't fix it !!!NARC4457 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Not sure if anyone mentioned it, but going to the next page of comments doesn't bring you to the top of the comment section. FF 3.6.2Voo - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Yeah noticed that too, FF 3.6.2Gets annoying pretty fast if you have to scroll up after going to the next page ;)
Peroxyde - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Hi,Just curious, what is the Content Management Software behind the new design?
coachingjoy - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Very sharp picture on my screen.Don't know if it's the site or what but nice.
Good Luck with it.
vol7ron - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
NICE!!looks got AT team.
vol7ron - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
looks good*pardon my free thinking fingers.
James5mith - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I can't say I'm a fan of the orange. It's very jarring. Maybe it's just because it's different, but I liked the way the old site kind of "flowed" with varying shades of blue/gray.BZDTemp - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I appreciate the desire to mix things up and while the new design is nice and clean perhaps even pretty there are some issues. Here is my good and bad list.1. I like the new colours. Bright but not too bright.
2. The new forum format works and looks nice. A+
3. Speed is nice. I'm thinking slightly longer to load than the old but not slow (Note this is on a 20 Mb line and a new PC, so some may think differently).
4. A lot more space on the top is needed for menus and such. Something like 450 pixels just for the top ad, the logo and top menus seems rather excessive and when you include the 280 or so for the ticker which advertises the different articles there is a lot of screen spaced used for not that much info. I'm on a big screen and I can just imagine how this is on a laptop or even a 24" 16:9 screen!
5. The ticker which advertises the different articles is very annoying. Please do away with the auto-scrolling it makes it like a huge ad across the page . Maybe just the headlines with mouse-over showing pictures and a teaser is an option or maybe just the headlines as links.
6. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. I know I'm repeating my self but on the old page I could see straight away what new articles was posted since last visit and also the DT headlines. The new articles seems to have gone and to see the DT headlines I have to scroll a good deal (and this on a 2560x1440 screen).
All in all I think the new design could draw in more user due to it's initial friendlyness but perhaps there could be a compact versions for those which like a higher information density. It could be in ones profile and main changes should be:
- making the menu area in the top more compact
- doing away with the ticker and just listing the article headlines
- highlighting the titles of the ones which has been added since last visit.
- Bring DT headlines up so they are on the first page (so no scrolling is needed)
- Maybe an option to put menus in a vertical bar and maybe combine this with support for free choice of page width.
Final words: Keep the good articles coming but please less bling.
MrSpadge - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
.. means you're not going to bother with traditional HDDs any more?Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
The categories at the top are just what we launched with. We will have many more going forward, HDDs included :) Users have just been asking for an easy way to see SSD content so now we have anandtech.com/tag/ssds.Take care,
Anand
punjabiplaya - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Looks great. And Virus free!tdawg - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
So far, I like the new design. Reminds me a little bit of the Engadget site design, except that it's coded much better! :) Very clean and modern-looking design.Thanks for keeping the site fresh!
toms98pc - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Wheres the print view option for articles?Kibbles - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Love the new layout.Nice new logo. The A needs more AA j/k =D
Hardin - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Wow this new interface is very different. I'm scared!Chad Boga - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
How do we print out the reviews to read on the couch?I couldn't find a print whole article button like there used to be.
morsel - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
The previous AnandTech web design was sensible, practical, and usable. The new design emphasizes form over function, and we the users will suffer for it.The scrolling headlines are obnoxious. They force users to pause, fast forward, or wait tediously to see them all, instead of being able to merely read the headlines as we used to do.
Article links are no longer a different color if visited. It may look more uniform to the web designer, but for users it means we can no longer tell at a glance which articles we have already read.
In article view, there used to be a print option which let users print or read the article as one long document, instead of having to tediously click through page after page.
Your content and site usability have made you the best for years, please don't ruin your site usability. At least let users access the lost functionality mentioned above with a classic view option, even if you don't bring back the lost functionality by default.
noxipoo - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
can you make the banner scroll faster on the main page? when i click the arrows, it scrolls really slow to the next one, no point being that slow? make it fast like google flip.Adul - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
doesn't work at all.I like the new layout so far. Through me totally off this morning.
[email protected] - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Congrats on the new look. It is a welcome ovehaul! Here's what I miss:- how do I remember my login and/or password? I just had to create a new account because I could not find a way to retrieve my previous login information .
- where is the 'Print this article' feature? That was very handy; not that I ever printed any article, but it was very handy to be able to have an entire article at the touch of a scroll button. Please bring that back!
Cheers,
Fernando
SunSamurai - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
1. The ad at the absolute top of the page looks off. Should be lowered, at least under your logo. Possibly to the right under HOME | ABOUT | ECT2. The CPU -> IT COMPUTING and Smartphones -> Guides tiling is too thick. Make the stuff a bit thinner. Im thinking anywhere from 40-80 pixels. It should look more streamlined.
3. The right side looks good,though the Follow Anandtech could be polished a bit. Looks tossed in there.
4. When a user is in an article, have a readability mode. Allow us to the over the right panel and re-show it again with a button click, and possibly further than that allow us to utilize our full screen width.
5. Colors could use some work (a bit more pale possibly, some colors are too vibrant, takes away from the logo and content imho)
Please ignore whatever Im missing, and thanks for the improvement, long time reader.
teko - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
...if it works...teko - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
And yes it does =)ptrinh1979 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Love the site!1) Nice change in layout. Clean lines, good fonts used - striking new anandtech logo on upper left. Solid colors in navigation bars.
2) I like the left-right scrolling of headlines, allows me to spend a minute viewing the article features - or I can just scroll down and skim them instead.
3) Good placement of ads, the site loaded faster for me where it counts, i did not have to wait for the ads to load in order to view the first "page" on my screen. Allows me to check the site in 5 seconds.
I am going to refrain from the dislikes because I realize this is a beta site, and that any that any of my "cons" would be in reference to my mindset of the old layout. I want to see how this evolves, because the new site clearly triggers a new mindset for me to view.
Keep up the great work, and great articles, Anandtech crew!!
-Peter Trinh
uibo - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
The new design reminds me of NASA. I don't know why and I am not saying it is bad. Though the upper part is too "empty" - big buttons, big spaces = wasted area. On my 1024x1280 monitor the menus use about 1 third of the visible area. the second third is used up by the preview gallery on the front page. You could make parts of the front-page customizable - but that would probably come at conformance cost too big...TheFlyingSquirrel - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I like the changeEverything is easier to look at and the new layout is easier to find stuff
thumbs up from me
JoeOnRoute66 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Anand,The new design looks great although takes quite a bit more screen space. One thing missing, I usually springboard from your site to Dailytech. Could you bring back a direct link to Dailytech on the right side?
jmccrary - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I love the changes! Very sophisticated.fledgling - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I appreciate the idea of more white-space and the such and love the idea of enhancing the websites performance although only through an impersonal approach as personally I don't ever have any performance issues. However I'm forced to say that in general I greatly prefer the old layout to the new layout. It just doesn't seem right for some reason, and it reminds me of the switch tomshardware went through right before they started going down big-time as far as the quality/interest of their articles... not that I'm saying the same thing is happening to anandtech but just as a comparison.As far the scroll bar thing goes... It does move too slow when you click it and unless you're crazy fast it's hard to tell if there's any new articles by looking at it since it moves so fast... unfortunately I think the old method dealt with this better, maybe making the scroll bar remain stationary and letting the user click through it would work better?. The layout as far as the main links and everything up top looks confusing (although easier to figure out for new visitors) and unconnected to the rest of the site.
Also the logo needs some work, at this point I'm still considering the old logo to look better, both to old and new visitors, the first few letters look good but then the rest looks like it was make with office's word-art. Ah, and the links to the right of the article seems to take up too much room, maybe shrink that column and enlarge the articles column?
Sorry about being so negative... I hope you can get it to the point that even I can agree that transition to the new site is a 100% positive event : ).
fledgling - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Looks like the speed of the scrolling got adjusted as I typed my previous comment... I still think the pause before it starts to scroll should be a little longer or perhaps it shouldn't automatically scroll... as it's a little distracting to me personally,... but it's an improvement : ).Luminair - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Sorry but you fail. The new Engadget/blog/whatever style is generic and unprofessional and ugly. Try again with something that doesn't look like a wordpress theme, or go back to the old one that doesn't look like its trying to compete with Apple for the most pretentious user interface awardaguilpa1 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Good Job to all.MadMan007 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
That thing is a complete CPU hog. On a [email protected] I go from 0-25%+ CPu usage just by scrolling that bar. I can only imagine how bad it is on lower power laptops or netbooks. Just make it snap to the next article, no fancy 'smooth scrolling' needed.Voo - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Yeah, the article header bar lags when scrolling and it can need 100% cpu utilization of one e8400 core if I click more than once. Needs some love ;)FF 3.6.2; Win7; Flash 10,0,32,18
Nataku - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Just want to say that the new site looks great, my only comment would be on the front page if the latest post area can be shrunk a bit so we can see more head lines? my scroll bar shrunk alot when I first entered = more scrollingGood Work,
Thanks,
DDG - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I like the new design! Please keep up the good work!MadBoris - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Hey Anand and staff,Great work on the site. There is alot to like, but sometimes we first notice certain changes not as desirable at first.
First off, the decision to limit the width to 1024 pixels is still disappointing in 2010, and still seems quite outdated on a site primarily revolving around reading material. I may just start using the RSS/mobile link all the time instead. As someone who knows how to design a site with a minimum width that can stretch, I understand the extra design work necessary, but it's a shame my 1900x1200 still goes wasted with 900 pixels of grey on this site unless I flip the monitor 90 degrees for this site. 1024 pixel width with text limited to 800 or so pixels width, seems outdated to me. The site is now even more all about vertical scrolling on my wide screen monitor, seems counter productive in that respect.
Speaking of flipping the monitor 90 degrees, it makes me wonder if that isn't the way it was designed, in that ratio. Wide screen may still be a minority, but 90 degree tilted wide screens is even a smaller minority of that minority still.
There is a huge amount of vertical space wasted on the site, from the top down, to where an article begins in the bottom third of the 1200 pixel monitor. Waste above and below first ad, first main menu, main menu bar has tons of wasted vertical space below and above text. it would be fine if this was a console and I was using a controller, but I use a mouse so i can rollover the huge fields Then the three image scrolling menu, while fancy, it is too slow(on a fast machine) and too big. 4 or 5 menu items with pics seems better horizontally.
I wish I could rotate my 1900x1200 monitor for all my web viewing 5 times a day, but I keep my aspect standard all day long and it's a shame more sites don't support wide screen monitors properly, by auto stretching more horizontally, not making me scroll more vertically. I know some of this is too late as to the design, but maybe some of the vertical space waste can be fixed. So not only is the horizontal unused, vertical is wasted in forcing me to always scroll more.
Otherwise, it looks clean and I will find more to like, I like the colors too, I just wanted to share some of my initial dislikes while the comparison between old and new is still fresh in my mind.
james.jwb - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
hi there, this will take some getting used to!One thing that's putting me off as a web designer: the reply box immediately makes me think of a quote box. I think it would be far better to use a colour much closer to the normal comments colour, i.e, only a few shades lighter so it doesn't stand out so much.
superjojo - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I usually open read Ars, Techspot and Anandtech everyday. I set my browser to open all three tabs automatically. When I got to the new Anandtech I thought I was looking at Techspot. I looks exactly the same.Any relation between anandtech and techspot?
superjojo - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Don't get me wrong, I really like the new design and AT is by far my favorite. I was just wondering.Gasaraki88 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Thank you for your knowledge and insight over these 13 years. I have come to this site since I was in college and consider this site probably the best tech site on the internet. I still come here now that i'm in IT for you server and ESX software reviews.Thank you, Anand.
Peter
tjcinnamon - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
It would be nice to be able to navigate to the Daily Tech latest headlines page from the right side bar. In the old version it would show as many "latest articles" as it could and then you could click more headlines and it would take you there (http://www.dailytech.com/Headlines.aspx).LarryMorley - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I used the print article function and it always opened a new window with all the separate pages of the article. I could scroll down much faster than opening new windows to get to the parts of interest. Especially useful to print the whole article. Hope you bring it back. Thank you...IlllI - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
now if only you guys can update the forum so it didn't look like it was stuck in 1999 !its such a fugly abomination that i hardly want to log into the forums anymore.
PhatoseAlpha - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
The styling for bold text and for hyperlinks seems to be identical - makes it hard to know what's clickable and what's just emphasized. Probably should be changed for usability.Bad Bimr - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Looks good but I prefer the old layout. Why fix something that isn't broken?Jamor - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Waaaahh! I miss the old design!...
... ok, I'm used to this new one now, it's a lot better.
Cheers, keep up the good work.
nowayout99 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I would say overall it's a nice site.However I do have one comment to make... a fairly small one, but one that is kind of annoying me.
Please reduce the size of the top and bottom "borders" along the top horizontal menus.
It looks like there's a large 15 pixel border above and below the words. It's inefficient use of space and a bit annoying. I'd rather not have the navigation smacking me over the head.
Please. Thanks.
MamiyaOtaru - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
comments section is a super pain to read. Black text om blue background is bad. My eyes hurt trying to make stuff out.faxon - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
the site is going to feel like were back in 2004, as you put it, until you make it possible for it to scale in size with resolution. there are plenty of other examples of this being capable (look at the forums), and it would make the viewing experience on a widescreen monitor while fullscreen much more streamlined. also, i havent tested on my iphone yet, but make sure the site still runs well on mobile devicesSANDAR - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
It looks like you guys have been spending a lot of time pondering the mysteries of WP7S.Me likey.
And yes, I've been reading this site since... '01? Maybe '02? I was fond of the old design, but I like the new one, too. It's your site, so if it makes you happy...
citan x - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
The carousel at the top of the page is bad. I keep trying to read a headline and it moves on me. I hate that.bluorb - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Where is the “print article”? It is very convenient to read an article without having to click for each page. Otherwise the new look is great.ratbert1 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Am I the only one who gets the articles through RSS feed? I was curious when I didn't get any new feeds for two days. And then DT stopped sending feeds today. And my bookmark to AT got a server error. Finally got to AT through an old article link. Anyway I knew changes were coming, though it would be nice to know that the RSS feed URL's were going to change, and that old bookmarks may not redirect.Oh, and after reading 18 pages of comments, I can say I don't know if I like the new site, but I don't care if there is a print article button or not. Save a tree for christ's sake.
bluorb - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I use the “print article” function to read one document on the screen (no hard copy).cgeorgescu - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Looks like you're targeting 1024x768, but:- given that readers of anandtech are power users, very few have 1024 horizontally, so you can safely default to 1280 (and you may offer, somewhere, a 1024 option for netbook users);
- the header of the homepage (ad+logo+menu) is 50% of the screen (vertically) for 95% of readers;
- there's a useless gray line at the top;
- too much space before/after the top ad;
- logo too tall (plus the menu on the right - menu 1 (HOME/ABOUT));
- too much space between the logo and the menu 2 (CPU/MoBo/SSD);
- menu 2 uses excessive padding (space lost);
- menu 3 (Smartphones/Memory) uses excessive padding around a very small font;
- on regular pages, space lost (vertically) is 145px: 65 before the logo, 50 between logo and menu 2, 30 because excessive padding in the menu 2 and 3;
- on the targeted resolution (1024x768), the logo is too much on the left, there are only 2px there. Move it another 20px to the right;
- consider highlighting the selected category/menu item;
- there's not much space for ads in the first 800px of the page. In the home page, you can place only one ad (at the top), in regular pages you can barely fit 1.5 ads (at the top plus half of vertical ad on the right). You get your money for all the ads in the page but your score gets very low because advertisers want people to see ads without scrolling.
And I don't know what you've had against the old logo. Seeing the page header, my first impression is that I've set my browser on large fonts.
On the home page, the latest posts section uses some very big pictures. And too much text. No matter what you do and what screen you have, you can't see more than one product/review at once. It doesn't actually give a quick view over several posts.
Just my opinion.
InternetGeek - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Guys, You could serve the MS Ajax library and mvc scripts from Microsoft's CDN. It might save you a bit on bandwidth. I think it also serves jquery as well.metalhead0043 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I love the new look. I've been lurking for a long time and registered just to say so.cgeorgescu - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Ah, and the ajax loading of comments... You're at comment nr. 10, click on next and expect to see the next page, the comment nr. 11. Nope, you see the next page but you have to scroll up cause you're at the bottom, you see the comment nr. 20.simtex - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Hehe, saw the new fav icon before the pages started loading, and thought something is wrong here ;)But overall the design looks promising, too much comment indenting to my liking, but that is my only complaint right now.
n4bby - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
i sincerely hope you didn't pay anyone for the new logo, because it looks straight out of Web2.0 Logo Creatr.
http://creatr.cc/creatr/
fail.
yannigr - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
You want to look more like 2010? Then how about forgetting 1995? You have to make a first page with at least 1650 pixels in mind, if not 1920. Putting big photos and more colors in a 1024X8000!!! pixels page it just makes it worst.I am sorry but with the new look you are not going forward. You are still thinking in one dimension. You should start thinking in two dimensions...
lordmetroid - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Pressing the view all comments, I really want to see all comments at once, at the moment I only get more comments per page which is certainly not what I wanted when I pressed the button.wrack - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Where are the "Accessibility" options such as text size and wide screen layout (technically not an "Accessibility" option)?stephenbrooks - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
To me the point of having a larger screen or desktop area is to have several webpages visible at once (each window about 800px wide), NOT for one webpage to be so large it takes up the entire width of one screen. The new design is too big with too much padding and spacing everywhere: wasteful.A good design should wrap intelligently so it doesn't actually matter what the width is. Ditch fixed width, have a look at some advanced CSS properties that allow you to wrap article-blocks in a flow that adapts to the browser width. The Dailytech column can be a div element with float:right, for instance.
fishbat - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
Will this feature be brought back? I'm missing it already.jonup - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I am sorry if this has been addressed already, but at the time of writing there are 197 comments. Can we have a print option. I know that it might not be benefitial to you from an advertizing point of view but I work on a lappy all day and sometimes I like to print a hard copy when I get home.p.s. How about a spellcheck in the comment section?
rmlarsen - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I miss the little dividers by date. Makes it faster to zoom on latest news on iPhone.redemmed - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
The site is cool. Don't know what took so long but I like it.seniorherbal - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
i notice that the "print article" button is not present. i hope you'd put it on soon. those were real time savers. many thanks.JimKiler - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
all us tech geeks should have wide screen monitors and the redesign is vertical instead of horizontal.Melador - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
As I type, I see my comment coming up in light gray text on whitish background. When will this fad of light text on light backgrounds get run off the net and computer screens (thanks Microsoft-NOT)? Did anyone think to contact the graphic experts (font makers, legibility experts) or did they just go directly to the marketing department ? BLACK text on 90% white/light gray background is very legible and doesn't cause eye strain like the light blue/light gray text. Column width should be (according to the experts, not marketing) approximately one and a half alphabets wide for maximum ease of reading if I remember correctly. A sans-serif font is also harder to read than a serif font. I can not believe how sheep-like the internet is! Everyone raced to see who could become the hardest to read using light blue font colors. Its insane. Please go for comfort and legibility over fadishness. The principles of communicating using text attributes has been thoroughly researched. Please make use of it or get a web designer that does.The content is great!
Hopco - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link
I second Sebec "I kind of liked the old design better, where you could see the most recent article headlines all at once, rather than having to scroll. I find it to be a hassle."But if you must be modern - I won;t complain too much for the info on the site is Top Notch!
Be kind if I am stupid, but why must the link from 'Latest from AnandTech' open in a new Tab? Can I choose for in go open in the same Tab, like most sites do? If I want to open the link in a New Tab, I can always chose to do so by right clicking in FireFox.
Anand keep up the good work!
Vimono - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
Or by clicking the middle button (scroll wheel) on your mouse ;)Jeff7181 - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
I'd like to see the site dynamically resize itself for whatever resolution/window size I happen to be using. Or at least give us a few options for common screen widths. I think it's safe to say the majority of us that visit AnandTech don't browse the web with a 1024x768 window and it would be nice to be able to use more of my screen real estate since a good potion of the page is used up already by ridiculously large and tacky ads.I don't like the auto scrolling deal for the new/featured articles. I guess if you must auto scroll them, at least give some indication of how old they are... if I load the page and don't have my eye on it immediately after loading, I don't know which article is the newest.
I also don't like that the DailyTech articles are all smashed together now. The date separators were handy to skip over stuff I've already looked at or decided I didn't want to look at and see what's new.
newyankee - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
The old site was so much better, so why change? The new design is horrible.Lemonjellow - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
Dunno if I'm just old and set in my ways, but I dislike this style of layout... I'm not a fan of it on other sites either... I liked the at a glance navigation of the old site... Everything was just there, but not in the way... Everything seems so... Large.... on both my 23" monitor at 1680X1050 and especially, as expected, on my lcd tv at 1366 X768...I also dislike that I can't read the Dailytech headlines without scrolling...
I don't think I ever really navigated the website using the topic buttons really... Unless I was searching for something specific, like an old video card review... It may help casual readers though, but since I tend to read everything... They just seem to take up a lot of space...
Either way, I don't come here for Dailytech, Twitter feeds, or shiny graphics... I come here for what I've been coming here for since 1998 when I first found it... The great articles...
So if this is how Anand and the crew want it "modernized" So be it... As long as the great reviews are SOMEWHERE to be found on the site... I'll come back...
Grabo - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
..Like the sea but in reverse. And the dark voids on the sides? It looks like Anandtech was plucked from its cozy and light home and dropped into the sea. Or in space.I do not fancy it.
dw_js - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
yes, this new site is flashier and has nice colors, but that doesn't make it better. I liked the old site better because the speed with which I could view the new articles on the page without having to scroll through them. No it doesn't take much time to scroll through, but it also causes me to spend less time here, and head to the other pages like Tom's, daily tech and tech report because I get a summary of the page on my first screen.It's just an opinion, and there's nothing wrong with liking the old site.
srdj - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
The new layout is amazing. I like it.But, there is something i'm missing. Where's the menu print article. I'm usually use menu print article to view the article in one page to read it later, so i don't need to click the page one by one.
Please active the print article...!
azcoyote - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
Wasted space on graphics, have to scroll forever to find articles...xeopherith - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
I really hate the scrolling top bar... I'll probably stop checking the site daily because it is so much more graphic oriented.GreenLoco - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
Way too much scrolling required for navigating. Pictures are too large and there is generally a lot of wasted white and blue space. Time to go back to the drawing board and tighten-up things I am afraid.Alkapwn - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
Where is my old Anandtech.com? What did you do with it?! I'll have you know, we will not pay a ransom. We do not negotiate with terrorists.Seriously though, the beta looks good... just going to take some getting used to.
Soldier1969 - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
much improved this is alot better! Nicely done!pmely - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
like the graphical layout - 2 things I missDaily Tech links: old site had date separators; made it easy to see where you last read the links
Reading an article: at the bottom of the first page there was a "Print this article" link that popped open a new window with the complete article in it in a printer friendly format. It also allowed you to read the whole article without having to click to see the next page.
jah1subs - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
Personally, I find scrolling a mobile device to be undesirable and have little interest in trying to absorb information dense content on a mobile device. Therefore the positive comments about mobile devices mean nothing to me. I was happy with the old site.That said, there were two features on the old website that made it easy for me to get around that are missing. The first is that in stories that are more than one page, you had an index and I could skip to whichever page I wanted to go to. Personally, I do a lot of that. These days, when I read non-fiction, I read the introduction and the last chapter and, after that, decide whether or not I will read any more. I have done that a lot with AnandTech articles. Please bring it back.
The other feature that is missing (from my perspective) was that you always grouped the Dailytech stories by date. I do not always to get a whole day's stories on one day and I used that guideline by remembering that I was one day behind, or maybe two days behind. I cannot do that any more.
Thank you for listening.
blw37 - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
Overall the look is good, but I much prefer to read reviews in the printable version rather than page through every single page. I presume it would be reasonably easy to put a "Printable version" link in?geok1ng - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
awful! terrible! a good pack of excellent ideas wrapped up in the worst format ever .I usinga 30"and guess what? i can not read all the new articles, must painfully scrool down bit by bit to get a glimpse.
and way too many color borders.
it probably has some positive side, but it is lost in the sea of scrolling. keep it beta, maybe using the new color identity with the old format?
ashegam - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
To me it looks just like the maximum pc website with different colors. Naturally times change and new things come along and at one point or another everything goes through a refresh. I personally liked the old design and it grew on me, it was a "WTH" moment for me when I ran into the new design today.ashegam - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
and actually looks even more like engadget, just a different banner on top.jah1subs - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
Hopefully, when the beta is over, Anandtech won't be so easy to spam!shabby - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
Any chance to get the dailytech news topics separated by date? Now they're all grouped together, before they you could at least tell which ones were from today or yesterday.leexgx - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
apart form the reviews and other stuff been norm very good, why remove the Print option it was very good thing to have now i have to press next on every page (guru3d site is the Worst for it 20-30 pages of having to press next)and due to the comments fasterbrowser addon does not work with your site to compensate for no Pint button (comments really need to have its Own page)
leexgx - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
Where is the spam buttonMuzar - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
Hi, as always, Anandtech is a great website with some of the best technical content available on the Web.Having said that, clicking through multiple pages is usually a pain (especially when reading an article over lunch or similar) and I took shameless advantage of the old web-site's 'Print' function to view articles as lovely continuous single pages.
Please bring that functionality back, or some other single-page analogue. I miss being able to just 'spacebar' or 'PageDown' through an entire multi-page article.
Adri Warsena - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
I love it, but Ican't see the "Print Articles", where is it?AsukaFan - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
OK, change to whatever design you want... BUT I'd like, I'd BEG for it, the old links system working!!E.g., if you use a link to this Nehalem classic article:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3382
or
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3382
... you get screwed up: just a generic error message, no article at all. And the same with links INSIDE the article ("check our previous article ____").
PLEASE, do us (and perhaps YOU, Anandtech) a favor and fix / redirect the old URL system, so "SHOWDOC.ASPX", "PRINTARTICLE.ASPX" and the old article numbers ("3382", etc.) work... with WHATEVER design you want.
Thanks a lot...
JohnNyceis - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
Fixed the first broken link. Printarticle links will work as soon as we get the print article completed (very soon).lflashl - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
Enjoying the New Site.. looking forward to see what else you do,,,MrSpadge - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
Could you please separate the DailyTech news by date? So that when I return the next day I don't have to try to remember what I already saw yesterday and feel strange when I read some news a second time ;)araczynski - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
way too much dead space on the top, a waste.seniorherbal - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
The scrolling needed to find articles takes too much time. I wish Anandtech would keep the good functionality of the old layout which was to show more articles without much scrolling on the home and head pages. Then add the look of the new layout/design for eye candy. Thanks.SkyDiver - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
Hi,It seems harder to quickly see everything that is available. I don't like the pictures/articles thing that rotates at the top. It takes too long to see what is there.
Toms Hardware came off my set of home pages when they did something like this a few years ago. I'll have to see what happens with this one. Right now, it looks like Tom's packs more information into less space. I might put that page next to this one and see which one survives.
I don't have a lot of time. If it isn't efficient, I just won't come here as much.
apcordov - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
It looks great!deadzoned - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
I am a long time reader that has never registered. I like the new design so much that I registered so I could let you guys know.papapapapapapapababy - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
at all. it looks just like techspot now. in fact anad looks like all the other sites now. lameMumrik - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
Ditch the carousel at the top. I don't want to deal with that stuff, just show me a graphical overview like you used to.I'd also love to see the actual content column (the one the articles are in) widened. But maybe that's just me being tired of wasting around half of my 1920 horizontal pixels.
twindragon6 - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
I miss the printable view. Is this feature coming back at a latter date? Even if it is not used to kill trees, it is useful if I want to have the article available in an offline mode. Maybe a download this article in PDF function would be cool too.initialised - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
I, like most of you readers mostly use widescreen. I have an extra half million pixels that aren't telling me something or distracting my eyes. I guess this will fill up with adds over time.velis - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
Great design. Although I too would like more of screen used. Right now there's about a quarter unused on the sides on my 1680x1050 widescreen. Also the page header + carousel are so big that I only see the title of the first article. Though I suppose shortening the header would make it less visually appealing. Don't really know.I do have one other tidbit:
The carousel is fantastically slow on firefox. A 2 - 3 FPS slideshow (when sliding to show other article thumbs). While on IE 8 it's perfectly smooth. I haven't gone so far as to check how you made it, but I'm guessing JavaScript + CSS. Could you please take some time to see if you can make it work faster on FireFox? I'm guessing firefox recalculates too much (something like the whole page) with current implementation. Perhaps a different approach that would fool the browser into thinking that nothing much has actually changed in that particular section of the page?
Brucmack - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
- Please add a "print" feature or some other way to get the entire article on one page. I often read Anandtech on my mobile with Opera Mini and it's annoying and slow to have to navigate between pages.- The RSS feed isn't made available from every page - I have to manually click on the RSS / MOBILE link to get it. This is different from most sites.
- I much prefer sites that aren't fixed-width - if I have a wide screen, why can't the content fill it?
- Bruce
Springfield45 - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
Please, for the love of all that is good, bring back the print view. Put adverts every few inches if you want, but let me view an entire story on one page.stephenbrooks - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
Why is the body text a shade of GREY rather than black?! It's horrid on the eyes and almost like you're deliberately trying to make it faint and hard to read.enyceexdanny - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
I like the fact that it's simple, but just not feeling it.. Sorry... If the design isn't finalized, I wouldn't mind even doing a concept design for you at no charge..enyceexdanny - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
And I agree with the above poster.. The lightest I would go for the text is #222222... Better yet, just go all out black..fongwen - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
The new look feels refreshing, got one suggestion, could u keep the widen page / larger font options? Cos it would be more comfortable on a 24' or larger monitors. Thanks guys for the update anyway :)Calabros - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link
I dont like the new logo, especially it's font. BTW, why u don try putting the logo at the middle? and....corners of the banner could be roundedwyemarn - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link
I was a frequent reader of Anandtech because of excellent contents but this new design with 'Print article' function dropped, looks like I would have to stop coming to this site. Print article functions saves me a lot of time and useful if I want to switch between pages. I wonder why Anand dropped this function. Only a few online sites left with print article function and one of them is Tom's.doratiog - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link
The possibility of reading the whole article without the tiring exercise of clicking and clicking again like if readers would have been punished and obliged to suffer Tantalus torture is gone. Not a good and rational decision if you wanted to improve your site. Your new design is irrelevant. You have taken the opportunity to make a change in favor of propaganda thinking readers must be stupid.Imaginer - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link
I don't like the fact that the logo has conformed to the whole liquid candy like style that has taken hold of many other web online sites. The comet doesn't even look like a comet anymore but rather one of those lobbing trajectory missiles.xcy - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link
I've been coming to Anandtech for over a decade.There was nothing wrong with the old site!
It was simple and familiar, just the way it should be and it should have stayed this way.
I don't like the new design and it doesn't add anything at all to the site, on the contrary.
The scrolling bar on top is hideous btw.
The content is all that matters!
Never mind all this nonsens about the "brand new look and feel".
Bring back my "old", trusty Anandtech!
jkostel50 - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link
Is it possible to view the whole article and not just a piece at a time?sushantsharma - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link
Great Work! Thanks to all the people at AnandTech!MrSpadge - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link
I've got a problem with it:when I get home after a long day I check the forums and open Anandtech. But until I actually get to take a look at the page some time passed. At that point the new article scrolling bar is in a random position and I can't immediately see what's new. Sure, I could still scroll down and take a look at the actual articles, but the "get all important information at a glance" is gone :(
Additionally: is the "new articles since last visit" gone? I found this to be useful, especially if there were more than 1 new articles.
Chloiber - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link
I REALLY like the new look and it's very fluid (comments,...),DBissett - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link
17 clicks to see 17 screens to see all the headlines, banners, graphics, text samples etc., just to see what you might want to actually read. Then at the bottom of the entire first page I find out there are 181 pages. Let's see. 17 clicks X 181 pages.....no, I've got better things to do. This isn't user friendly or effective previewing of the website's content at all. It's a pain in the rear. Put up a simple list, by category perhaps, of the article titles and assume users are bright enough to perhaps recognize what they might want to read. KISS, KISS, KISS. AnandTech was uniquely good before precisely because it provided lots of content efficiently. Now that some of the worst practices of graphic designers from the rest of the world have been adopted it kinda looks like the rest of the world, i.e. it doesn't impress as a better site to visit.Dave
Chloiber - Sunday, April 4, 2010 - link
Am I the only one missing the TIMES of the comments?xcy - Sunday, April 4, 2010 - link
Man, this sucks...I can't get over it.
Bring back the old site!
NOW!!!
Zensen - Sunday, April 4, 2010 - link
it has its pros and cons obviously but its a shame... now there really is nothing to appreciate about this site anymore and to keep me coming back to it.Wayne86 - Sunday, April 4, 2010 - link
The AnandTech title bar, the links right below, the featured stories slide, and post pictures are huge!My recommendations/preferences are:
1 .Reduce the height of the blank space for title and links right below,
2. Reduce the featured stories pictures by 30-40% (Height and width), remove the slider (lags Firefox atm), and fit 4, 5, 6 stories there
3. Reduce the height of the story pictures by half (wide angle shots, you can still get a lot of detail)
4. Change "Latest from AnandTech" to "Latest from DailyTech", remove DAILYTECH from same section.
5. W3C Strict instead of transition (yeah I know, not likely)
Thanks for reading my comments Anandtech, I love the new design and color scheme.
Yaron - Monday, April 5, 2010 - link
Congratulations. The old website was really getting... well, old! :)I was wondering if there will be a version for mobile phones?
Pozz - Monday, April 5, 2010 - link
glad to have the print button back, but is it me or when you actually try to print an article it only prints the first page?Belard - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
For the most part... my browser isn't getting cookies or whatever so it knows the password to this site... so every few posts or a restart (after rebooting/starting PC) of Opera 10.5, I have to constantly log-in.The Site looks better. The logo on top is kinda odd.
I guess the huge menu is more for iPhones & other smart phones... but it seems difficult to find new articles... what is not seen on the first screen is lost... so if you add 2-3 articles on a single day, we might not know about it.
Like the new logo.
mkorn92 - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 - link
It seems to me like the things in the main column on your home page should be just that, "main". The Just-In is nice but you might want to consider putting it in its own section somewhere else on the home page. I constantly see the stuff that is just in, which is nice to know what you're working on, but it adds to the amount of time it takes to find the full articles. The Just-In titles tend to take up too much space for just a short notification of what is sitting in your labs and in the end just clutter your space. I like the idea behind it but not the way it was executed.I am also against the large scrolling thumbnails at the top. They take a long time to scroll even if you specifically click on the arrows to move through them. Also if you just skip that and scroll down you get the benefit of seeing basically a short summary so you know what the article is focused on. I know you really liked the idea of it but that doesn't always mean it is the best thing to do.
trexpesto - Monday, May 10, 2010 - link
Nice look - Where's the beef?bruceb - Friday, June 11, 2010 - link
The main site we are on now, needs a good, functionalsearch. Say to find comments by user or ttile.
Otherwise not too bad so far.