For the past 12 months, I have often asked you, our community, how we could improve the site — how we could make it better, cleaner and simpler to use. And each time, you have responded with great suggestions. We took all those suggestions and passed them on to the folks at SilverOrange, the design firm that has done the Mozilla and Digg sites, to come up with something simple, utilitarian and classy.
Of course, the new redesign had to reflect some of our business realities — incorporating content from our network sites, for example, and including advertising without being too suffocating. It took a while, but we finally got it done.
The new, two-column design features our new, more formal logo, designed by Arno Gelfi, a friend of ours from Red Herring and Business 2.0. And it addresses our readers’ biggest complaint — that the main content block was too constrained and narrow.
A couple of points about the new look: We have created a featured posts block right at the top, which allows us to showcase some of our long-form writing. Readers kept telling us that trying to find these stories was quite frustrating. Of course, we as writers want to get read, and we think the new design makes it easier for you to find these “featured” stories, which are also available via a featured story RSS feed. The new design is also — at least in my opinion — open and airy, giving me an opportunity to put up shorter posts, quick links or random musings.
The GigaOM network stories are available at the bottom of the page, and hopefully you will sign up for our network RSS feed to get the latest from what our diligent team of writers is crafting throughout the day.
The focus of this redesign is simplification. Hopefully you agree. Of course, your feedback is invaluable and we eagerly await your suggestions.
(We are going to be tweaking it over the weekend, so bear with us while we make the changes and perfect it. Of course, let us know if you capture any bugs. Also check out the new look WebWorkerDaily)
Nice one Om and crew – looks like you have come over to my blue side 🙂 Def. more airy and open.
My only thought would be to add another color in the text and headers somehow – right now its a ton of blue with no breakup.
I assume its still being installed but a variety of pages have no content and there are no meta desc or keywords.
I didn’t realize you guys were hosting on wordpress.com!
Love the redesign! The simplicity is great! I hope to see this applied across your network eventually. 🙂
Looks good. The clean look lends itself to the quality posts. Thanks & keep it up.
Layout is much better now. No Space-Crunch now.
With Firefox 2.0.0.4 on Leopard I’m seeing a scrollbar on the rhs of the blue page header (scrolling down reveals the GigaOM logo)
Reply-ing to a particular comment is not working. Gives some error. But the new commenting is much better. You don’t have to do – @Name – Reply.
Really first class design. Easy on the eyes, and easy to navigate. Bravo!
@ John
I am using the same browser to check things and not finding that problem. I was wondering if you were getting caching from the old site. ANyway if you send me a screen shot info at gigaom dot com, it would help debug.
greatly done, thanks tam gigaom
@ Allen
Thanks buddy. Can you elaborate on your comment about the colors. Would really appreciate it. Thanks for the feedback.
@ Samuel,
Thanks – the plan is to make sure that we make the entire network look consistent and simple. Of course without compromising the unique abilities and focus of those sites. Stay tuned.
Om, congratulations on the redesign. I very much like what I see thus far.
Best,
Jason
@ Jason, @ techmine, @ Jeff, @ James W
Thanks guys. Your comments make it all worth it. We are doing some final tweaks over next couple of days and the site will be polished to high gloss by Monday. If you see anything let us know.
Om- It really looks great, congratulations. I like the comment-count header in red, and of course you’ve still got the best avatar in the business. One suggestion: Something that I appreciate about TC is the way their employees’ comment entries are highlighted with a different bg color. Here’s hoping you can incorporate something similar: the author’s comments should be easy to find when scanning through.
@ DaveA
Thanks for reminding me about the highlighting edit team comments. It should be taken care off by end of the weekend. There are some things which slipped through, but hopefully we shall have them licked by then.
The site looks great, except the fonts, they don’t seem to go well with the overall look (the headline and the subject fonts doesn’t match well). The logo is nicely done, I think the ad covers too much part of your name. Overall great design.
@ Chris
I think the fonts is because of some CSS glitches. We are fixing those. I think the logo issue is something we need to think about. we are going to chat with SilverOrange on Monday to tackle that issue.
Looks good – the GigaOm show was nicely edited – you guys got some good footage of the site, thanks!
I feel like a noob again 🙁 🙁
I find that movement in the ads distracts horribly from the content. The ads are far more salient than the logo, the content, the font…
But I’ll keep subscribing to the feed, where the ads are (so far) much less intrusive.
The site is a lot cleaner, but the redesign is nothing original. How many sites have been redesigned in the past few months with almost the exact same general layout. Technorati, Dooce, JohnChow and many others have such similar layouts, you could swap badges and the difference would be close to none.
I’m sure its more functional and easier to navigate, but not a lot of originality.
Om – This looks extremely good. Cheers.
somehow i liked the earlier look better 🙁
I guess I will get used to it. But I appreciate the effort to keep evolving!
Would the people of my country be able to get the old template, Mr. Malik? Will it be available for sale, or perhaps made freely available?
Mr. Malik,
The GigaOm home page (www.gigaom.com) looks fantastic, especially the various shades of blue, while the inner pages, are not far behind. The ‘Comments’ section is simple amazing, with options to reply to a respective respondent. I didn’t knew a feature as such existed in WordPress Blogs.
Since you’ve mentioned, “We are going to be tweaking it over the weekend,” I have some suggestions:
The search bar at the top-right of the page, can be shifted a little to it’s left, such that it alignes in order with the Ads below. At present it has been corned to the North-East.
Right at the bottom, there are links to ‘Advertise, Contact, About’. I believe the order in which they appear should be similar to the one as above (top of the page, header), i.e. About, Contact, Advertise.
I really like the new look. It’s made it a lot easier to find more stories without stuffing the page full of content. One bug though, the archive page doesn’t seem to be working (http://gigaom.com/archive/)
Overall, I like the new design. The featured section and the bigger content box are definitely a good idea. Having said that i feel the main text font is too light, maybe it should be a little darker. Also, i liked the old gigaom logo better.
Om – good design — eventually we as readers need user friendly ness and eye catching content and personally I like facts in bullet points and your site good in it!
@Om Malik
I’m having the same issue as the other John, with the scroll bars on the header. I’m also sent to a 404 page with a broken glyph “don�t” when I click reply on a comment.
Congratulations in the new design 🙂
@ John,
Thanks for that bug report. We are aware of the 404 page problems, that should be fixed later today. Bear with us.
@ Allan,
Those are fantastic suggestions and we totally skipped those, so thanks for catching them. We are adding those to about 50-odd things we gotta fix over the weekend.
@ Martin,
The archives pages are a WordPRess bug and we are waiting for them to fix it. It worked on our local servers, so slight problems there. Thanks for the heads up though.
Om- Quick one about search. If there are no results, the page is blank (no “There are no results for your search” message). Also, if there are hits, it would be very helpful if there was a summary at the top (e.g. “13 articles contain your search term ‘redesign’.”). A really, really nice thing would be the option to collapse the view to titles only.
It’s clean and quite easy to read. Nice improvement!
@ DaveA, that is a great suggestion. Thanks and we will try and make it happen. The search is not working for some odd reason. hopefully by end of the day today 🙂
You and your team did good work, I have enjoyed gigaom for quite some time and look forward to the fresh view.
Sincerely,
Americo de Thunk Different.
In general, it looks good, but you broke the printing. The previous design had a print style sheet that properly formatted pages and was useful for either long posts or those with multiple comments beyond what can easily be read on screen. (It was the best design feature of GigaOm and one of very few blogs that properly print.) It no longer works.
The “HP Blog Print” is much less useful and far too complex when all you want is a single post.
Actually the printing is still there. at the bottom of the post, like sphere, and share buttons.
bkirby that is coming back too. don’t worry 🙂
I really liked the old one better. This is nice but it seems to be a step backward in concept. What are you doing with the old one? Can I suggest GPLing it and releasing it to Automattic for use on WordPress.com, etc?
I would bring avatars back, especially since WP.com is adding Gravatar support soon. It brings back the community to your comments.
Matt
Avatars are all there. the only place they don’t show up in in asides. we will bring avatars back to the comments section when you roll out gravatars.
Love the new design. Well done to all involved.
Om,
This is just splendid, great work as always.
I won’t say you’ve just made another fan, since I am your fan for some quite time now, but you’re eventually going to disrupt the way I’m reading my favorites blogs each morning. [checking up yours more often since you’ve just improved my experience!]
Thanks A LOT!
dudes, this looks sooooo much nicer and cleaner…makes me want to actually come to the site instead of just the rss feed in nnw…
Hey Om,
I really dig it!
My only comment would be that the network nav ( i.e. gigaom, webworker, newteevee ) kinda looks like main nav for the GigaOm site. So if you’re unfamiliar, you click one of those “nav” options and it takes you away from your site all together..
And I agree with the above about the advert dominating your logo.
It’s looking great though…
Thanks for all the great content!
Hey Om,
Just thought I would let you know that the site look great.
It is hard to realize that the other sites in the navigation bar at the top aren’t just other pages on this site.
We all know but first time visitors might not. And then the “am” and “pm” in the comments are on the second line down. Overall great work.
@Steven Ray and @ Ethan
the problem of logo – ad is being addressed right now though it might take a day or two to roll out.
the nav bar is going to go through some minor changes to clarify everything. hope to get this right soon enough.
Looks great! Gave me so much grief finding a decent wordpress theme supporting the widgets I need. The only option seems to be the default one which as everybody says does not give enough space to the content in the main column.
Really slick, well done!
Nice work! What an improvement. I used to avoid visiting GigaOM (only to subscribe to the feed) because of the slow, cluttered web-site.
I especially like the typography and the content layout.
My two cents on your visual design:
As I said last time you redesigned, I liked the dark blue design you had before that the best, elegant and newsy. It may have been a bit staid for a tech blogging site but it would have been better to tweak that one, maybe by adding a reddish secondary color, than the other designs you ended up using. However, with this design, it does look like you’ve gone back in that direction a bit.
Following up on what one of your previous commenters said, I have noticed that the site has been slower to load since you went to wordpress hosting. Maybe it’s all the ads from the different ad networks slowing the page down, but I’d suggest hosting elsewhere as the site doesn’t seem to be as responsive at wordpress.
The blog entries need more padding on the left side… at least in Opera. The text literally bump up against the side of the application with no padding.
Steven: What version of Opera are you using? I’m using Opera and I don’t see the issue you mention. Thanks!
Ajay: Sorry about the load time, though the fault lies with us and not WordPress. We haven’t had time to optimize our new layout properly. Should improve over the next few days.
At last we got more width for the contents ! But it is too heavy on blue..
Different colors for heading would be nice…
Great look and easy features. Although blue color is all over the web!
The earlier one was better. Too wide and doesn’t have the inetersting appeal that I used to have earlier to read.
I have to agree with Andrew about the ads, they are horribly distracting. I have a huge monitor and decent resolution and 2/3 of the page is taken up by the header (which includes ads), the right hand ad bar, and the “jobs” insert, which also has an ad. There’s only room for two story snippets! That seems like the wrong balance to me…
Mr. Malik,
I have one more suggestion,
The last time I checked out Gigaom.com (after the design update), the Font Colour for the Respondents Name was same as that of Comments (at the top, next to the title). I don’t know why, but that RED looked good. And in many ways prompted me to click on the hyperlink of a respective respondent.
Mis Felicitaciones por este nuevo diseño, hace poco que conosco el blog y me gusta mucho, felicidadess 🙂