Here's another quick update on Salon's redesign with some of the issues we're working out, changes that we intend to make in the near future and a general introduction to the new look.
First, thanks for all of your feedback; we're learning a lot from what you're telling us and from the way you're using the site. Here are a few things we're dealing with in the near term:
We also have a long list of smaller changes and fixes to make. We'll be working our way through that list in the next weeks, so if you've already reported a problem, please be patient!
On the bigger question of why a new design, I wrote about this in my first letter, but just to recap: In choosing this design direction our primary motivations were to present our articles in as clear a format as possible and to give us as much flexibility as possible to present new features, lay out additions and the like. Our old design made it extremely difficult to adjust the layout; it handcuffed our ability to present Salon's daily editorial offering in new and varied ways.
Our general template now looks like this: We have a column of AP wires running down the left side of the page in reverse chronological order, a cover box with the four to five biggest stories of the moment, a Blog Box area, descending below the cover box, where we can break out our burgeoning collection of editorial blogs, and below that a complete index of everything we've published recently in reverse chronological order.
We arrived at this design because it allowed us to showcase more than one story at a time; in the old design, stories that weren't quite cover stories or were interesting for another reason couldn't be highlighted. Another problem we had in the old design was the lack of a more extensive index of our recent publishing history. The new design lays out everything we've published recently in reverse chronological order so that it's easy to find an article from a few days ago.
All that is to give you a window onto our design philosophy and the problems that this design was intended to solve. Our entire process was obviously much more extensive and ended up consuming a year of design, testing and functional improvements.
If you have other questions, notes, suggestions or complaints, please send them to redesign@salon.com.
We are reading all e-mails sent to this address and responding to as many of them as possible.
Warm regards,
Joan Walsh
Editor in chief
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