So, what do you think of it so far?
Thanks to the herculean efforts of the The Voice’s Ryan, we’ve got a new look and new features. The biggest change on the home page is the introduction of three featured stories at the top, so that the best content can stay prominent for longer without being pushed aside by the latest blog posts.
There are also many changes which reflect the declining proportion of our audience who sit at a computer and come to the home page. Whether you view the site on the move (new mobile version), like using a news reader (nice big RSS sign up button), prefer getting information via email (check out our email lists in the top right) or stumble upon us via search engines (lots of search engine friendliness added), you should find the site is better for you.
It’s a big and in some ways quite complicated site though. So if you spot anything broken, think anything isn’t clear or feel something could be done better, please let us know. If you really, really want, you can even say nice things too.
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22 Comments
I think it is dreadful. It sacrifices ease of access so as to look trendy. Do I really have to go to another page to ‘continue reading’ even the shortest article?
I quite like the clean look and not bothered by the click here to read more as that is what we did on the old version anyway.
I do think the forum where I did most of my posts is going to be key for me, its currently not visible, guess there is still work to do in that area
Good clear site and looking forward to see what it looks like on my non-3G mobile
It’s terrible!
I like the hand-drawn look of the Facebook/Twitter/email/RSS buttons. You should draw the main “Liberal Democrat Voice, Our place to talk” banner in the same stylee, and also ‘The Voice’ avatar in top right of this post.
I also prefer the removal of orange. Less garish to look at.
Functional design seems good, artistic wise it seems abit unfinished / uncoordinated each item looks good (hand drawn stuff in top right is cool) but it doesn’t really feel like it goes together? altho I am reading on a tiny AA1 sooo ymmv!
Having contributed nothing whatsoever to the email list discussion, I now barge in at the last minute and say… cor, I really like it! The Featured Items thumbnails don’t respond to clicks though – should that be? And they look slightly lost, like maybe they should be in a row instead of a column?
W/r/t what Duncan says, I agree that the logo isn’t a great fit (mind you I didn’t think it was a great fit with the old site either). But at the moment I think Ryan’s done enough and we’ve still got merchandise with the current logo on, I think. Maybe once that’s run out we should run a brand logo competition? Winner decided by STV?
Peter, we’ve moved towards having more ‘continue reading’ links to make sure items don’t get buried too quickly. As we usually feature 7-10 stories every day, it’s easy for important ones to get lost. The site seems to be working much more quickly now, so I don’t think it’s too much of a hassle.
Alix, as you roll over the thumbnails the Featured at the top story changes.
And, for the record, I think Ryan has done a stunning job – and all free of charge while he was on holiday.
First impressions: I very much like the idea of having featured articles. I think perhaps you have got rid of a bit too much of the orange/yellow (I rather like it, and it does identify us with the party, though I agree it was perhaps too dominant on the old site). So far, so good!
P.S. THANK YOU for allowing us to subscribe to comments!
I do dislike intensely having to click to finish reading a story. There is no need for it. As long as the feed continues to provide the full item I will most probably resort to reading LDV on bloglines from now on. I cannot get the new site to configure or load properly in Firefox though it is OK in my old version of windows explorer. The featured articles gimmick only works on the latter for me.
P.S. On my Assembly machine I keep defaulting to ldv.org.uk where I am not allowed to comment.
Re. Peter Black: I’m on Firefox at the moment and the site seems to work fine.
Re. Stephen Tall on the Features: rolling over doesn’t seem to work for me. A Firefox problem, as Mr Black suggests?
One more thought on aesthetics… the grey fading background used for posts by the site editors worked well when the site was more garish, but now looks very dull. This should be changed to a more perky colour.
Like the new design but where has lib dem blogs gone to?
http://www.libdemblogs.co.uk/
Could it be a fourth tab next to Most Read/op-eds/recent comments?
I’m not a party member so don’t know if my opinion counts for much but I don’t like this at all. It looks cheap, the icons for FB, Twitter etc look hopelessly amateur. Really don’t understand why your design has taken several giant leaps backwards…
@Peter Black, the message at the top states that ldv.org.uk is a temporary redirect whilst your servers don’t have the latest DNS records. Unfortunately our redirect doesn’t pass on the comments, and this is why the option isn’t available.
The reason for having the “Continue Reading” is that the old home page was huge, took time to load, put pressure on the server and meant that a post from yesterday was miles down the site. By trimming the content all of those issues have been avoided. It also encourages people to read the comments.
Re: Featured Posts, hovering over the thumbnail images should switch the stories. It works fine on the Firefox and IE8 installs I’ve got. There was a CSS/Javascript issue in IE6, so the box behaves slightly differently (only one story on show, no thumbnails).
Of course there will always be people who miss some kind of feature, or prefer a certain type of style, however a website will never satisfy 100% of the visitors.
There’s no Libby anywhere, you’ll get letters…. 😉
I like the icons too. The featured article thing doesn’t work properly on my “Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu canonical – 1.0” (Firefox 3.0.12), but hardly anything does unfortunately.
Aesthetically and functionally awful. No offense like, but that’s the truth.
I liked the recent comments and most read nearer the top of the page – now I have to scroll to see them. I like the new banner and think the site is quite a bit cleaner.
No feed from LibDem Blogs anymore? Makes it far more difficult for good posts from less known bloggers to be seen and read.
Agree with Sara about LibDem blogs – please, please re-instate the feeds for those of us that don’t have the time to bookmark (and read) N LD Blogs regularly!!