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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)
Congratulations in the new design :)
@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.
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!
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.
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/)
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.
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?
somehow i liked the earlier look better :(
I guess I will get used to it. But I appreciate the effort to keep evolving!
Om – This looks extremely good. Cheers.
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.
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.
I feel like a noob again :( :(
Looks good – the GigaOm show was nicely edited – you guys got some good footage of the site, thanks!
@ 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.
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.
@ 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.
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.
@ 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, congratulations on the redesign. I very much like what I see thus far.
Best,
Jason
@ 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.
@ Allen
Thanks buddy. Can you elaborate on your comment about the colors. Would really appreciate it. Thanks for the feedback.
greatly done, thanks tam gigaom
@ 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.
Really first class design. Easy on the eyes, and easy to navigate. Bravo!
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.
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)
Layout is much better now. No Space-Crunch now.
Looks good. The clean look lends itself to the quality posts. Thanks & keep it up.
Love the redesign! The simplicity is great! I hope to see this applied across your network eventually. :)
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!