You wanna be an alpha... tester of The Register's redesign? Step this way

Here at El Reg towers, our backroom boffins have been toiling away improving our proudly Perl-based homegrown online publishing system. Among their latest work is rejigging The Register's website so that it looks spiffing on desktop and mobile, automatically adjusting the layout depending on your device's screen size. Whether …

[JohnHMorris]

Re: Horrible

Well said. Don't let the marketers take over .... the Register has worked hard to achieve something that is also reflected in the stream of lovely bricks. Don't over-engineer ....

[Stephen Hurd]

Ok, maybe I understand now...

So after reading some of the comments, I think I "get" it now...

There's a block of four "Top Stories" (chosen by editors) first, followed by the seven newest articles (Top stories and most read excluded), followed by a row of four "Most Read" stories followed by all the rest newest to oldest.

At the bottom is a link to "older stories" which links to a list of days in the current month (oldest first) with some breadcrumbs in reverse order (July -> 2018) that you can browse other days with... clicking "July" let's you choose other months in the current year, and clicking 2018 lets you choose a year, then a month. None of the links here takes you to a page where the first story is the one before the last story on the previous page.

So the "older stories" link I find irritating... I want to view the older stories when I click it, not a list of days in the current month. I'm not suggesting an infinite scroll, but a link to the stories that came before the last story on the page would be very nice.

[eldakka]

Re: Ok, maybe I understand now...

I agree with what you've said generally.

However, for recent 'older stories' - if that makes sense - try the /Week/ context, i.e.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/Week/

[JohnHMorris]

Density, behaviour, scanning, harvesting, enjoying ...

Note on usage - I like density - and always set TR to desktop even in phone. The low-density phone design (i.e. new design or old design mobile) requires scrolling and doesn't present much at a time. My pattern is "right click and open in new tab" three or four times. So the key is eyeball scanning and selecting. Only works well with a big "field of tasty selections". Graphics artists love whitespace. But it's the bane of real work.

JHM

[Ozzard]

Fine in broad outline, nitpicks below...

With a headline as I post this - one article to the left, several to the right - it looks somewhat asymmetric as the image is not in the centre of the page. That's probably a good thing, except that there are no visual cues that the picture is associated with the left-hand story until you hover over the story or image. It'd be good to have a cue to that effect; my slightly Aspie brain doesn't associate image and story as it stands.

I still prefer more control over my vertical pixels. Any chance of a comfortable/cosy/compact setting (not that I ever use Gmail or anything, oh no) that squeezes the designer-grade whitespace out of the page and replaces it with minimal whitespace?

Please, please, *please* can we have rid of that floating top navbar with the ALL CAPS? As noted last time, it's been demonstrated to be less readable than mixed case; and once again, it's vertical pixels that I can't use for my own nefarious purposes.

Finally, any chance of an "advanced reader" option that blanks the stock images that adorn most stories, and their teasers on the main page, leaving only any that are genuinely related to the story? Once again, it's wasted pixels; I'm really not interested in seeing the same stock image that's been used for the last three related stories deployed again. It doesn't help me discern what the story is about; it doesn't convey information that is specific to the story; and in general it's schlock stock (where *do* you get your images from, as they're generally of rock-bottom creativity?!) If I could simply splat the images, that'd be great.

Thinking about it, maybe I should just make an override CSS and load it ;-).

[JDX]

I don't need to see it to tell you it sucks

At least that's the feedback you're going to get. Every SINGLE community website makeover I've ever been involved with has been thus - users up in arms that "it's literally blinding me", threatening to boycott the site, even creating custom scripts to recreate the old look.

It doesn't matter how brilliant the site is, in my experience. Better to set up a feedback email piped into nul.

[89724102172714182892114I7551670349743096734346773478647892349863592355648544996312855148587659264921]

More Vultures Required!!!

When browsing, javascipt switched off by default is my personal preference. Please make sure that your redesign works with javascript disabled, as it does now. Also don't tie the users to one tab, ensure that links can open in new tabs - I hate Google News since the recent toxic refresh because it's much less tabbable. The movement towards "Mobile first" is a travesty. Actually don't change a thing, El Reg is great the way it is.

[Alister]

Forum pages

We need a link at the bottom of the forum (comments) pages to take you back to the home page, without scrolling back up to the top.

Where it says "The Register" in red used to be hyperlinked, but it isn't any more.

[DrBed]

TIFKAM?

Seriously: What's the point of all those frames (boxing)? Reminds me of TIFKAM... or worse.

SQUARED.

Rest is OK, I suppose. Clean, maybe too much. Some beige somewhere, e.g. more retro-look?

Oh, and more Vultures, of course ;)

[-tim]

Geolocating options to turn it off?

I would love to have https://www.theregister.co.uk/uk as well as https://www.theregister.co.uk/us and https://www.theregister.co.uk/oz which would turn off the geolocated story selection.

[Dave559]

Re: Geolocating options to turn it off?

Do we actually see different featured stories depending on where we are located? I didn't know that «shock».

[Marco Fontani]

Re: Geolocating options to turn it off?

Do we actually see different featured stories depending on where we are located

Since time immemorial, the homepage has had "editions" - US, AU, and "GB/Rest of World". The list of stories on the homepage slightly changes depending if you're in US/CA, AU/NZ or elsewhere; very few stories are set to have an edition, but it can be noticeable.

All of them are shown in their respective section, though.

Similarly, the Editorially-picked stories (top stories, don't miss, etc) are also picked by geography.

This allows, say, the AU or US edition to highlight a really interesting "local" story which wouldn't otherwise have the same global importance - while at the same time allowing a particularly interesting "global" story to be able to be shown in that same spot in a global fashion.

[onefang]

Re: Geolocating options to turn it off?

'US, AU, and "GB/Rest of World"'

Ah, so Aussies like me, how are in Oz, but use the web via a European proxy, will get "GB/Rest of World" stories. Might explain why I tend to see more GB and less AU stories.

[FrankAlphaXII]

I don't particularly like it on mobile (Firefox 63.0a1, aka Firefox Nightly on Android) because navigation between sections isn't intuitive, and it's not cleanly divided. Like it would be fine if each major section had one article a piece and you could tap on something to go into the section the article is in but I don't see a way to do it without tapping the menu button. It's two taps to navigate between sections where I'd prefer it to be just one from the front page.

The desktop version has a menu bar though, so no complaints there. I'll likely just use the desktop version on Mobile.

Aside from that, it looks good.

[Mike 137]

"Hidden cookie"?

Perhaps the Register would like to explain "hidden cookie" and its full implications?

[Marco Fontani]

Re: "Hidden cookie"?

Perhaps the Register would like to explain "hidden cookie" and its full implications?

TFA says:

Click here to enable the magic hidden cookie to opt-in for the 2018 redesign

and:

The cookie expires after a week, at which point you'll return to the current design.

That's pretty much it.

The link (well, the redpill page's JS, which can be read) sets a cookie, called "test_redesign", and sets it to value "2018", valid for about a week. Clicking the "Back to Classic Homepage" button instead sets it to "off_2018".

Our Apache configuration ensures that even when your preferences are set to seeing the mobile version of the site, that cookie "takes over" for www's homepage, and shows you the new version; on our back-end, we simply check that the cookie exists and has value "2018" and if so we stash a variable, making the templates do what they need (set classes on the body tag, output a different SSI than the "classic" version, etc).

The distinction between "2018" and "off_2018" moreover allows us to see how many opted in and "stayed there", vs how many opted in and quickly (or not so quickly) "went back".

As to the redpill page, that's mainly been used in the past in order to see currently running A/B tests without influencing the outcome of them; i.e. being able to see "revision 2" of a unit, without the page view and/or the click "being counted" for the experiment. As it's meant to be a temporary setting one does, the related cookie's set to expire in just a week. We merely reused that facility to allow you, dear users, to opt in for a relatively short time - without "forcing" you to be part of this alpha/experiment for too long.

[Anonymous Coward]

I generally like it except that the home page is not consistent with the information it gives about each article. Sometimes it gives the section/keyword, age, or author and sometimes it doesn't.

[Jim Whitaker]

Too many images on the home page just for the sake of pretty. One per page should be the max unless actually relevant (not just pretty) to the subject.

[nextenso]

New beta site dreadful in mobile

The mobile version (Android 8) of new site appalling, one those unuseable ever scrolling sites where you get lost trying to find an article read few mins earlier. In desktop view heading fonts miniscule. Pleeeease don't do this. Your current site provides quick easy way to see all articles.

[eldakka]

One of the issues with news websites is their seeming incapability to get away from old print-media paper styling.

For example, when you would walk into a newsagent, there'd be 10, 15, even 20 different newspapers lined up so that you could only see the top half, the above-the-fold part. You aren't allowed to touch them, to pick them up and read them, until you buy it. All laying there side by side so the customer can see at a glance all the competing newspapers with the story their publishers think is the most eye-catching.

It was even worse for magazines, there were literally hundreds of different magazines, all vying for optical space, eye-catching space so a customer would even be aware it existed, on the racks that they had to have splashy headlines, eye-catching images.

In that system, yes you needed an eye-catching above the fold headline and/or picture to in the first instance catch the eye, get enough of the customers attention that they'd even notice it existed, then to encourage someone to buy your paper over the other ones, take it home/work/park/cafe and then to read through the rest of it.

With websites, this is not the case. Sure, catchy headlines are still good, but you don't need to attract this initial "I see you" attention, because by going to the website you have already caught their attention before they've even seen your page layout or flashy images. You don't need to persuade someone to buy it over another site because by browsing to the site to see the front page the consumer has already, philosophically if not literally, "bought" your site and is reading it. They've already taken it home/work/park/cafe and are reading it.

Therefore the 'top stories', or visually eye-catching headlines, pictures, are just not necessary. I've already bought it, and already flipping through the pages (clicking links to stories), reading it.

As a consumer in this position, the only logical reason I can see for things like 'most read' stories, or 'top stories', is because there might be some specific reason you want those pages clicked over and above the customers interest in a story on a site they've already bought into. Is there extra advertising? Is it really an advertorial that the news site gets extra clickthroughs just from someone reading the story? What is the ulterior motive for flagging these stories when I can see all the stories, all the headlines, just by scrolling through and picking out the ones I want to read?

I am not saying this is why The Register does this, but since there is no need for it in todays online experience - it just doesn't work the same way as print media sitting in a newsagent sharing shelf space with everyone else - then suspicions are aroused as to why. Whether it's purely innocent ignorance: "this is how print media has always formatted their front pages, and we are just a digital version of them so we'll format using the same theories", or something more: "this is an advertorial that we make more mony from than other stories so let's try and get more clicks for it" it's still problematic styling.

[Anonymous Coward]

"In that system, yes you needed an eye-catching above the fold headline and/or picture to in the first instance catch the eye, [...]"

The tabloid favoured by Bristow was designed so that whichever way you folded it to carry - it always showed a lurid headline.

[Marcus000]

I do read The Register at work but I have to make the window small enough not to show the pictures as i am supposed to be doing something else. You need to make your website look more like a technical document, so i dont get into trouble. Thanks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Technical reference document

@Marcus000: read it in Lynx ;-)

(But perhaps a "boss mode" stylesheet option could be a nice easter egg…)

[JDX]

Perhaps get a job at a less gulag-esque company.

[Denarius]

layout

PC: decent white spacing do delineate the separate articles. Will check on mobile later.

Dont see much difference otherwise

[Dave559]

"Expand comment" - we're Regtards, we have attention spans

While we're thinking (re)design, I'd very much prefer if the "Expand comment" toggle in the forums/comments either went away, or perhaps if it was a configurable option.

One of the genuinely great things about The Reg is the (mostly) literate, intelligent, interesting and informative nature of the comments. I think that most of us do have attention spans longer than 30 seconds, so if someone has taken the time to write a longish and hopefully thoughtful comment, I'd much prefer to be able to actually read it without an extra click (it's fortunately rare here for there to be long comments which are just quasi-literate rants, so the risk is fairly low, I hope (as long as Bobby Tables doesn't try for an input buffer overflow)).

(cont'd p.94)

'; --

[JDX]

Re: "Expand comment" - we're Regtards, we have attention spans

Disagree. Not every long comment is interesting even if it is cogently argued - a sub-thread on some particular point perhaps. How much effort is it to click a button to read a long comment?

[Dave559]

Re: "Expand comment" - we're Regtards, we have attention spans

> Disagree. Not every long comment is interesting even if it is cogently argued - a sub-thread on some particular point perhaps. How much effort is it to click a button to read a long comment?

Fair enough, that's why I also suggested that perhaps it could be made a user-settable option.

But certain old usenet habits die hard: just pressing «space», «space», «space», … repeatedly (or keeping scrolling down), Just Does The Right Thing (Eventually), without having to move your finger. Having to reposition your pointing device to click on an "Expand Comment" button does take some "effort" (even if only a marginal amount extra). ;-)

[onefang]

Re: "Expand comment" - we're Regtards, we have attention spans

Also in a lengthy comment thread, it's easier to quickly glance at the scroll bar to see how much more you have to read if they are all expanded. Otherwise you end up going through the page clicking all the expand comment buttons, then go to the top to start actually reading.

[Marco Fontani]

Re: "Expand comment" - we're Regtards, we have attention spans

While we're thinking (re)design, I'd very much prefer if the "Expand comment" toggle in the forums/comments either went away, or perhaps if it was a configurable option.

If you're an "active enough" user of these forums (i.e. if you qualify for your comments to be automatically approved), you'll now be able to toggle the option. If you've not ever set it, if you try expanding a comment you'll find a small message hinting you to pick your preference on the matter.

You can head to the "My Forums" tab of your "Edit my details" (account) page, and you can toggle the "Switch off automatic post fading" on if you'd like.

[onefang]

Re: "Expand comment" - we're Regtards, we have attention spans

'You can head to the "My Forums" tab of your "Edit my details" (account) page, and you can toggle the "Switch off automatic post fading" on if you'd like.'

I like, and I turned off, er on that option. No more "More", er I mean no more "Expand comment" for me. Thanks.

And now I've re-enabled the cookie to keep seeing the new stuff. Doing a bit of A/B testing.

[Dave559]

"Donate" button

I assume that the "Donate" button, for those of us who hate tracker ads, but who would nevertheless hate to see The Reg hacks have to resort to begging for a beer, is coming in a later iteration of the design? ;-)

[Miguel Vieira]

MOST READ updated

Thanks for the feedback so far.

The 'MOST READ' unit style has been updated and it should be easier to understand its delimitation and which articles it agglomerates.

Other raised concerns in this comment section are being considered internally and we'll be addressing the identified issues.

[SeanEllis]

Seems OK

Nothing awful happening. Layout of non-filled lines is a little scrappy, but it works.

And best of all it works nicely with scripts disabled, too. Thanks for thinking of those of us who are in "default deny" stance.

[Anonymous Coward]

I like having four headlines in a row, instead of the previous three. I always blocked the ads in the right column, so I'm happy it goes all the way to the edge of the box now.

But some rows only have three articles in them. For some reason, the article positioning in those rows don't match up with the rest of the rows. Unless the row is somehow (very obviously) special, you should fill up earlier rows before putting articles in lower rows.

It feels odd that not every article has an image associated with it. While every article in a row is configured the same way, it's still hard to tell which article a picture is associated with. If I look hard, I can see a little box around the headline (+picture), but I do have to look hard to see it. A slight color change between the inside of the box and the overall background would do a lot to help delineate the individual articles.

There's a mouse-over effect, which just seems pointless. It's kinda nice that it helps with the previous problem, but it doesn't help that much.

I find it odd that you barely use your main logo color (red) in the design. Try using it to help organize things.

The style doesn't seem to have been applied to the headline page for the various categories yet.

Overall, I think it's an improvement--if only for the first point.

[Nick Ryan]

Page scroll stuttering

Something I've just noticed is that with the new design the page noticeably stutters when images are scrolled into view. Switching back to the current design this does not happen. Disabling JS also stops this unpleasantness as well, although it also means there are no images...

[Miguel Vieira]

Re: Page scroll stuttering

The new homepage "loading" behaviour follows a mobile-first approach.

A particular concern was how the new behaviour would affect users bandwidth and overall page loading time. If ALL the images are loaded in the raw HTML we are:

a) slowing the page load;

b) forcing users to download images that they may never see (specially for the articles further down the page), or in the case of mobile devices matching certain breakpoints, they would load an image that we would later HIDE in the CSS as don't want the image to show on those small devices this then means the image would be loaded as it was part of the document but would be entirely useless to the user.

To avoid this wastage of bandwidth (and avoid the slow page load) we opted for a lazy-load solution via JS, where images are not requested UNTIL the time a user has "shown intent" of seeing them, this is done via a JS function which determines said intent based on the users scrolling behaviour, the parameters for WHEN to trigger a given row articles image request are something we're still fiddling with.

This lazy-load technique means that the raw HTML can not contain the article images as doing so would defeat the purpose of the lazy-load enhancement (and bandwidth saver) and as a result users with JS disabled get no images on the majority of the articles.

If the page scroll is stuttering for you, my guess is that you're scrolling "too fast" OR experiencing poor network conditions. If you can provide us with your device details, we'll try to replicate the stuttering.

See https://www.theregister.co.uk/Page/problem.html

[Nick Ryan]

Re: Page scroll stuttering

On demand image loading is "fine", however the new site appears to be performing processing even after the images are loaded, which is almost certainly what is causing the stuttering.

The old site, using the same browser, and all that, exhibits none of the same problems, therefore it is something related to the new site code.

I'm not "holding it wrong" :)

[Marco Fontani]

Re: Page scroll stuttering

On demand image loading is "fine", however the new site appears to be performing processing even after the images are loaded, which is almost certainly what is causing the stuttering.

If you scroll "that far down", you'll likely have two things happen on scroll: delayed image load, and possibly additional ad load - both happen only if they require to. We've gone to great lengths to ensure that the delayed image loading shouldn't strain things at all.

The old site, using the same browser, and all that, exhibits none of the same problems, therefore it is something related to the new site code.

I'm fairly sure the old version would just "feel like" it's better when scrolling, at the expense of that time being spent at load time. I might be wrong, though!

[WhoIsThis?]

Boxes and more boxes

I don't envy the job of the people doing this.

To me it looks okay, except that it's harder to read because there are all these boxes everywhere. I also find there is too much white space on the page, but then I think that about most webpages nowadays.

[Nick Kew]

Aaargh!

Took a look on the macbook with chrome - which blocks fewer pictures than my usual.

So many pictures. Whole rows of stories with a picture each. What a waste of screen space!

And indeed, whereas narrowing the browser causes the stories to wrap OK, widening it shows those "rows" of stories fall flat on their face.

[ah21]

Intrusive ads

Well. Tried it, and where I had my adblocker disabled on The Register...had to re-enable because the new format is just not nice and the ads make it worse. With it enabled...it was readable at least.

[Aladdin Sane]

We need

A Sir Pterry icon.

#gnuterrypratchett

[Strange Fruit]

Less images on homepage

Can I add another vote for less images on the homepage. Reading on iPad, I get ~16 headlines on the existing layout and only 6 on the new, leading to far more scrolling and reduced ability to scan through the headlines for stories of interest.

As others have already pointed out, the vast majority of the images are stock and add nothing of value to the actual story.

[Aladdin Sane]

Re: Less images on homepage

Fewer

[onefang]

Re: Less images on homepage

"Fewer"

Perhaps we need fewer less-ons on grammer?

me grabs me coat

[silentmovie]

More really is better

Seems you have reduced the number of articles visible on the first page from 40-odd to 30-odd. I don't find that at all user-friendly. In fact I think it should be increased to 50 or 60 so we have longer to view them before they are consigned to the oubliette of "Older stories".

[Marco Fontani]

Re: More really is better

Seems you have reduced the number of articles visible on the first page from 40-odd to 30-odd

Old homepage count is: 4 "top stories"; two rows of 3 stories; don't miss story, and 1 story; 12 more rows of three stories; 5 "most read" stories on the RHS. That's 4 + 2*3 + 1 + 1 + 3*12 + 5 = 53 stories; -10 (if you don't want to count the hand picked ones) is 43 "chronological stories".

New homepage count, based on current layout at time of writing: 4 "top stories" (or 1 "breaking news" which isn't currently up); 7 stories; 4 most read; 5 rows of 4 stories; one row of 3 stories + ad; 4 rows of 4 stories = 4 + 7 + 4 + 5*4 + 3 + 4*4 = 54 stories. That's one more than the "old" homepage. If you discount the hand picked ones (4 top stories + 4 most read) we're then at 54-8 = 46 stories. That's three more "chronological" stories than the old homepage. If there was a "breaking news" instead of the "top stories" block, it'd be 51 stories counting all of them, or (still!) 46 discounting the hand picked ones.

You're absolutely right in pointing out that we're showing one less "Most Read" story on the new homepage, down from 5 to 4.

The amount of stories shown on the homepage has grown and shrunk over time. In fact, I've twice halved it in the past few years (since the last EOY 2014 redesign) as not many people were actually reaching that far down. Less is more. The amount of stories on the homepage is, though, something that we can easily iterate on if we want. We've picked a number we were comfortable with and which made sense in the framework of the new design.

[silentmovie]

Re: More really is better

Thanks for the explanation. I'm really only interested in the "chronological" list, so I'd much prefer that to be expanded, at the expense of "top stories" and/or "most read" if necessary