Folks – we are going to be relaunching our site shortly, and what this means is that there will be moments of high anxiety and major service disruptions. Well, anxiety for us at least. And I apologize in advance for service disruption.
As of now we are not going to be making any updates to the site, up until we have cut to over to the new servers, and the new look. This should take most of the afternoon, and good part of the evening. At that point, I would be ready for a stiff drink … and some fun. (Finally a chance to dress in all black!)
We have plans for that as well. We have teamed up with Sharpcast to have a little party this evening at Mighty in San Francisco. [ Yahoo Map ]The private party is sold out (so to speak.) You are welcome to join us later at 10 when the private event is over. We will have a live band and deejay music. All details on Upcoming!
Update:
Looks like most of the site is working, though there is some weird stuff, and we will be working hard to fix this. I just wanted to take a moment and give a shout out to TeamGiga: Dave, Barry, Chauncy, Ideacodes, Katie and Nitin, who worked around the clock to help me meet the launch goal. I also would like to say thanks to friends like Mike Rundle who influenced my design sensibility and to Matt Mullenweg for writing WordPress. Tina Sedonne did the most excellent illustrations. Thank you guys!
Couple of design notes:
The Tabs: You channel surf on television, and you tab browse on your Firefox/Camino/Safari and IE 7 (beta). The tabs are just a way for you to focus on the sections/categories you love the most. Don’t like VoIP, but like to keep up with Mobile, just hit the mobile tab.
Featured tab is for our top stories of the day. When you have stars like Robert Young and Wagner James Au writing, well you got too much good stuff to have just one top story. All Stories give you everything from “today” in one easy to consume page. Just want to read Katie’s stories, you can click her byline and get only her posts.
More RSS Options: You might have noticed more RSS options. You can pick and choose what you like by your interests. (Mobile, VoIP & Telecom, Connected Home, Startups, Broadband, Software 2.0, India Inc., Online Games and Featured Posts Only.) We will offer you Author-Only feeds in a few days, so stay tuned. If you want it all, there is always the GigaFEED!
GigaOM Weekly Email: In case you miss it all, we can send you a weekly email, with our recommended picks. Hope you sign-up, even though it’s old school.
Folks, I am out for now, and counting on your patience, and support. Please send us feedback using our contact form. Bugs, complaints, suggestions and how we can improve this: I am at your service. Here is to writing more good stuff!
Have Fun OM,
Although i wont be there. Have fun at the party.
Awaiting the new and improved GigaOM.
who’s the band?
why are you dressed like a Pilgrim?
… well Om may look like an Indian, but he talks turkey like a Pilgrim 😉
Om,
Nice new design, who did it? Its very clean.
Oh wait till you see the picture in full. No pilgrim no where. 🙂
Om & Company,
GigaOm’s looking pretty awesome! I’d beenreading most of your articles on Business 2.0 magazine eversince the magazine was launch; after the merger of 2 cool magazines.
Now, I visit and read this site when i can’t wait for the new issue of the magazine — or just don’t want to be left behind with news in biz and tech.
Congratulations…
the design looks like it’s optimized for a width of 800 pixel and above – but unfortunately it doesn’t really play out that way. on win xp, firefox with 800 * 600 you get horizontal scroll bar. which is probably not what you guys had in mind …
‘nonym’… thanks for the feedback on screen size.
we’re still working on a number of things; we’ll try and do a little more optimization over the weekend… after we stomp out a few more bugs, and get some sleep 😉
om! your avatar! word. you are the illest internet mc ever. party like it’s 1999! literally! btw is this a desi party in any capacity? make sure you have some nice kuris for the exclusive after party 😉
p8ce out homey
-k3wld00d
Love the new design and structure of the site.
good luck!
lookin’ good om san! have two drinks for me – 🙂
lookin good Om.
Wonderful. Love the new look.
All the best,
James
Om,
looks great! I love how the posts are more defined in the design. I also like the nice touch of the comment bubbles.
Keep up the good work. We will be reading you like always everyday.
For me, when I click on the different tabs, I am redirected to a different blog layout. Is this on purpose? Ortherwise, I love the new design.
Nice work Om. Congrats on all the success. We need to catch up soon, it has been a while!
OK – I think it’s time I told you that you’re PISSING ME OFF for not inviting me to any of your parties!
You party on the rooftop of my buddy (and former next door neighbor) Chip Conley’s hotel, you hunker down with the WordPress kids the night before – you even send me to your favorite Tandoori place in Delhi – without a name of the matres D’ – HOW THE HELL am I supposed to be schmoozing without your help?
Looks great!
More power to you, Om!
Nice. Good luck, Om.
Great party tonight and congratulations again on the launch!
-Kristopher
Om–the new site looks great. Keep up the good work!
–Trevor
Looking good. Launches are always er, exciting. Have a successful launch!
hi om,
good new design. looks nice and friendly. but for some reason i can’t find your link section. i am sure yourboadband wiki still exists and i visisted it from time to time to get some info, but i never bookmarked it, because its part of the ompire (and was linked from the main page). same goes for your other sites. any plans to put the links back up?
moritz
Hey, Om
The site rocks. Thanks for posting India/Asia specific news; a lot is happening here. Keep up the good work.
DesiDigits
http://www.contentconcepts.net
Om
new site looks great. best of luck with Gigaom empire
Best Regards
Fergus
Om & gang, this is really nice! I love the comments section. It’s so clean and readable. BTW, you’ve got the best open forum for comments that I’ve seen on the web and it provides extensive material from readers that really adds to the overall experience.
Thanks.
Three suggestions:
Not sure why, but except for the comments page, I prefer the old design better.
Anyway, Congrats for the re-launch! =)
Nice to see our “St.Stephans Fellow” getting an extreme makover !! :)_
COng’rats to TeamGiga and all the best !!
ebrahim: thanks for the feedback, and sorry to make you feel ‘blue’…we might try out a few font ideas to see what works best for folks.
moritz: we want to bring the broadband wiki into the OMpire at some point in the near future… working on that one.
My only criticism – and this is design-related – is the serif font for your blog post titles. It just doesn’t flow with the rest of the theme, which is smooth and bubbly. Either make it bigger, fatter or just go with a similar font style to everything else.
That said, I really dig your solid placement of ads (integrated but not obnoxious like other blogs and content-sensitive tabs across the top; the two stand-outs for me.
Go back to Avenir, it looked a lot better…
The new site looks really cool! Good job!
New design looks fantastic Om! Loving those tabs.
p.s. Dave M – are you working for Om now instead of SimplyHired? I must’ve missed that news…
I adore the comments design — very pretty.
Love love love the new design!!
Om et Team, I wish I could provide some constructive feedback on how to improve the new site but I’ve knocked around for about 30 minutes and can’t find any weaknesses.
Lay out is simple and intuitive. Color scheme is easy on the eyes and
inviting. Nice use of rounded corners and bubble comments to make the site feel less “tech” and more community.
Hope you all enjoyed the party and any subsequent sleep. It is well deserved.
Best,
George
p.s. If you are going to have an India tab, why not a “Canada” tab? We’re doing some great things up here.
I could do without the horizontal scrollbar. Did someone get the page dimensions wrong?
Hey OM, are you still sleeping? Must have been a rather enjoybale party.
Cheers,
Jack
Oh and on the layout:
I think it looks good. 2 things though:
the black line on top that strikes right through the logo is not necessary imho, and the horizontal scrolling annoys me 🙂 also, do you sell your sponsors to only advertise to 1024 px + folks, and not to 800×600?
jack
I think the old design looked more professional. The current one looks like some random wordpress blog on the net. I’m specifically speaking of the rounded corner-framed posts with categories and tags unceremoniously dumped at the bottom, the comment speakbox frames that may seem cool to some but waste a lot of space, and the light blue and cartoon visual design that adds some personality but seems like some amateur blog on the net. The header and the footer of the pages are fine, it’s the framing of the content that’s not so great. I also like that you added links to contiguous articles, I always wanted those.
I like that you tried to add some personality but your visual design communicates who you are. The old design communicated a slick, professional reporting blog, the new one seems like some kid on the internet installed wordpress and tried to write something cool. I prefer the former though it could always have been spruced up.
well ajay, all we can say is… everyone is entitled to an opinion 😉
Hello Dave, Good to hear my opinion was registered. Don’t mean to step on any toes, are you the one who came up with the design? I was just stating some honest criticism of the new design, mostly aesthetic (except for the bloated comment boxes, please cut those down). Perhaps you can articulate what the goals of this visual design were, why you made the choices you did. I’d be interested in hearing about it.
hi ajay –
well, can’t say i was the only person involved in the effort — the man himself was a significant influence, as was our design team over at Ideacodes and others Behind the Curtain.
however, one of the overall goals was to make it easier for people to discover the different content verticals the GigaOm team covers, and also to provide the writer headshot illustrations, to make it clear that folks like Katie and Robert and others were also writing stories, not just Om.
the tabs are there to make it clear what subject areas we cover, as well as to allow people who like those subjects to focus more on their specific interests. we also created the ‘Featured’ section so that articles didn’t move so quickly off the main page. before, when everything was all in one area many times feature articles flew by quickly — however that view is still available via the ‘All Stories’ tab if you like the all-you-can-eat approach.
while i can’t comment on the colors & look & feel (i’m not a designer), it was a design that several people seemed to like. but hey, we know we can’t please everyone. and we’re always open to suggestions 🙂
regards & we’ll keep working on it,
Yeah, like I said, I’m talking about the visual design, not the way the site’s content is linked to. I guess it was done by ideacodes, but they could have just been following orders. I’m not sure that most people would think this visual design was better than the last.