Slowly but surely...

...the new site is shaping up. As I promised before, we've implemented a number of changes to the new site and I honestly think they are for the better. But before I talk about the new changes, let me talk about where the idea for the new site came from:

We had some pretty big meetings here at AT a couple weeks back and one thing to discuss was the site layout and what we felt it needed.

One thing we noticed when looking at the old site was that although we were displaying tons of articles on the front page, very few people scrolled down and clicked on the last review being displayed on the front page. In fact, after a review had gone below the 3rd position on the front page it hardly received any attention.

The next thing we noticed was that once an article fell off of the front page, it was very difficult to get to. You either had to go to the section that the article was located in (e.g. CPUs) and hope it was still on that front page, or try and remember the name of the article to search for it.

So what we had was a site layout that was great for daily readers, and great for finding fairly recent articles if you wanted to find anything else you were left with the search engine and that's all. This is where the AnandTech Product Coverage section was born from, and we kept it at the bottom half of the page so that the focus would still be on the latest reviews.

Then we thought that we wanted people to use the Product Coverage section so we tried to keep it at least somewhat visible by compressing the latest reviews area of the site. We ended up making a mistake here in that we were too aggressive in cutting the number of reviews listed with images/descriptions down to 2. We relied a bit too much on the text links to the right to make up for it, and have since reversed a bit of the decision. Now we display 5 articles to the left, and still display 8 to the right, so we're actually displaying more content on the front page and it's done in an even smaller area than with the old site - but I think it works now that we've tweaked it a bit.

The next thing was that we wanted to make room for what we finally decided to call AnandTech Insider stories. These articles are quick little 1 - 2 pagers that are usually verbally confirmed rumors, etc... that we get from our sources on products and technology that haven't been officially launched yet. The problem with these stories was that we would sometimes have 3 of them in a week, meaning that they would push the reviews far down the page, cannibalizing the attention those reviews got. Our solution was to separate them into a section of their own, and since we've added dates to the review/story titles now you should have a better idea of what's new and what's not.

Another huge motivation for us was page size; even on broadband the old site would take a bit longer to load than I liked, but now the thing just flies. We have pulled the news off of the front page, but the headlines are still there and you can go directly to the news page if you'd like to see a listing of all of the news in an easy to scroll-thru fashion.

The added color and tweaked graphics were just things to complete the package and everyone is entitled to their own opinions about them. We've tweaked the graphics a bit in response to reader comments (as well as the rest of the design which should be evident by now) and I think they look even better now.

When we launched it I liked the new site better than the old one, but with your comments I'm now loving it a lot more. We are still tweaking a bit but I think we've nailed the major things. Jason (the man responsible for the code behind the new design) and I both take every single comment to heart (as positive or as harsh as it may be) which is something I hope is quite evident by the quick turnaround on the design changes that you've seen here.

A big internal motivation for the new design was to move to a much improved web architecture, something that Jason will be talking about in greater detail in a Behind AnandTech article. AnandTech (the main site at least) is now running on a Microsoft .NET platform and the site is faster than ever. Although the site may look familiar, the entire web architecture has been re-done and re-written and it's pretty impressive if I do say so myself. We haven't scheduled Jason's article about the site's architecture yet, but I'll be sure to let you all know when I have a better idea of when it'll go live.

That's about it for now, I'm working on the Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 (400GB) review which is currently scheduled to go up on Saturday. So far everything's going well so you should expect that review this weekend.

Take care :)