Blogs Welcome to bit-tech 2010

Actually, the distance from the top of the page to the first piece of content has been significantly reduced. It's about 80px higher up the page. On the previous design there was the bit-tech header, the breadcrumb, then a banner slot, then the menu and then the content. Now there's a top menu, a banner/header slot and the main menu before you get to the content.

 

Fonts are being tweaked. Full blog post to follow!

 

Ahh well, it was a nice try, but looks like most people want the old site back.

Yes, we may get used to it after a while but why settle for second rate when it was perfect before.

As a regular visitor every day (my pc is left on 24/7 with a few firefox tabs constantly open, including this site on auto refresh) I feel disappointed in the new design. The main articles took the main focus with a decent pic and description, with the news stories taking smaller focus at the side but still equally readable. Now the site is just a wall of text.

Why is everybody obsessed with change just for the sake of change?

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

 

Do they? Have you done a survey of all bit-tech readers? Didn't think so.

You clearly didn't read the blog post on which you are commenting, did you?

 

Glad to tell you that it's all fixed, in both browsers

 

I have to disagree with most people complaining here.

To me the new design is better because I tend to not find enough information on front pages in general. Massive article previews, ads and stuff always take up most of the space.
The new design is like old BT but compressed. More information in a smaller space, great for me.

I do however dislike the new wavy background design... why not make it wider and spread it out a bit more or make it smaller and let it fade away completely at the sides so it doesn't look cut-off that much?

 

Holy wall of text batman!

People interested in HW ,mods etc, want to see larger pictures of said drool worthy stuff, not text overload. Anandtech's redesign seems to have it about right imho. This is definitely a retrograde step -the only thing that seems bigger are the often unrelated flashing ads.

 

Let's not start flaming each other. I don't see why people are being blasted for not liking the new design...and I've already asked for a poll to be added so we can see exactly how many people are in favour or against the new look.

 

The lack of 'proper' summary text on the "latest articles" list is starting to annoy me.

For example:

Books based on games: Halo
"Before you start your ranting, if you don’t know already from my mercenary attitude to buying..."

That really doesn't help me learn what the article is about. If you're not going to populate dedicated summary text, I'd suggest losing the snippet entirely rather than grabbing the first line or so from the article.

 

I didn't flame you for not liking it at all. You're quite welcome to that opinion.

I was just saying you shouldn't make that assumption that everyone doesn't like it just because a few people have said so. It's like anything, if people don't like something then they're more likely to complain than if they do. I'm sure once everyone gets used to where they have to look to find something they'll wonder why they were even complaining in the first place.

And you should probably read the blog to see why they made the changes before you say it's just change for the sake of change, because it isn't.

 

+1 on that.

As I've said before, while I like the redesign (it's miles ahead of old Bit-tech), it doesn't do a good enough job of making the latest and greatest content obvious.

 

Hadn't noticed that before now its going to annoy me. grrrrr.

My only real bug bear at the moment on the front page, is the changing height ratio of picture to black text box for the article thingy on the top left. I'd prefer the text box height to be constant, but its not going to make me rage if it stays as is.

Oh and I use the term "thingy" in its technical engineering sense

 

If the redesign is to show more of the new articles being read then why not simply extend the list they had on the old front page? The layout, visual style and article descriptions were far superior.

Sorry to sound negative, as I said before, we'll all get used to it, but for regular visitors the old format was a joy to use.

 

Thank you for changing the font! It's all good now

EDIT: Except for this:

(OS X.5 + Chrome 5)

 

I shall be addressing that problem at some point.

 

That's just a hangover from the change-over. We're changing to the new style as we speak.

 

Honestly don't understand how anyone thought that this is an improvement, obviously the proof of the pudding will be in the erm... traffic count.

The layout seems far too generic, with nothing given prominence, demanding attention - the latest 6 page review carrying the same weight as a one paragraph blog?

 

I'm actually starting to notice I have a hard time finding what I want to read and deciding if it'd be interesting or not, all the articles blend together and none of them stand out.

 

Thanks!

and yes, I understand 1024 width is standart. No complains there.
(and I also understand it's probably necessary to have the "Ad" comumn so wide...it is cramping the other two though.)

 

OK, feedback. Sorry its not good. The only part that is fine is the toolbar along the top.

The articles now are squeezed into thing lines that force scrolling downward. Masses of new adverts. No account at all of page width. It's 2010, we had pages that resized properly to screen size years back. Its less clear, harder to read, and for some reason everything is based in some vertical madness.

Perhaps many people do reside in this 1024 width, but I can honestly say given wide screens are totally dominant, and that you are a tech site, from where I sit, it looks bad, and masses and masses of page width is simply not used, and everything else is packed into a hard to read vertical scrollfest.

I really really don't like it. Its a lot worse from a readable view to me than your old pages were by magnituded. So much so its actually making me consider removing it from my favourites.