This afternoon we rolled out a new homepage.
The idea of the homepage changes was to better organize and highlight content.
The larger two stories at the top and then the four others further down the page are articles that we’re featuring. They may be brand new articles or articles that we don’t want to get lost in the shuffle when we’ve had a busy day.
Other than that, everything that was in the old layout is available in the new layout, except in a more condensed three columns instead of two.
The other main change is the site is now centered and a little bit wider than before.
With the changes, we’ve also implemented a new article search feature that lets you use the player search box to search for any article on the site across all our blogs.
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If you’re wondering if there are more layout changes on the way, there will be a minor update to the article pages to center them and change the font size over the weekend.
I’ve seen that generally the reaction to the changes have not been positive. We’re always open to suggestions and if there are things you like or don’t like about the new layout, please use this thread as an opportunity to weigh in.
Update: For those of you experiencing the boxes around the comment icons and headers, those should be gone now. There was a formatting issue with IE browsers only.
I think the new homepage makes it easier to access all of the content on the site, but it seems a little cluttered. Maybe placing a border around each section (Fangraphs, Notgraphs, etc.) will make it seem a little more organized.
I second that
I third this, without borderlines the whole website appears to be a big mess. I would also like to add that perhaps featuring the “featured articles” below the three sections would get across your desire to give some people easier access to articles. I like seeing all the stories first before I look at the featured articles. I can’t quite figure out what to suggest with the three sections of fangraphs while also keeping the quick ability to access all of them, excdpt what I suggested above with the placement of the featured articles below the list of articles.
This is the worst Kwanzaa ever.
I think more “ink” will just make it worse. The problem is precisely that there’s too much “ink” on the page and that the organizing structure isn’t even a little intuitive. If it is well organized and presented, there shouldn’t be a need for borders. But when you conflate column structures, row structures, etc., the reader just doesn’t know where to start. It’s like a bad newspaper.