El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

This topic was created by Drewc .

[Anonymous Coward]

El Reg Redesign - leave your comments here

December 19 Update no.4 - changes

Changed screen outside site background colour from white to grey.

Top Art in stories - now editorially selectable - in response to feedback about relevance (see above).

Reduced headline font size on Hero “story” at top of front page, articles and forum pages.

Masthead - entirely clickable to get back to front page(with exception of area containing social media buttons).

Footer - “The Register” text now clickable to help return readers to front page.

Visited and hover states swapped for better readability.

A Christmas masthead!

One week on. Update No.2 - our story is here

Update No.1

just letting you know that we are listening to your feedback. A quick update for now - we’ll report back to you next week.

Half-second delay added before the mouseover triggers drop down nav. We hopes this eliminates those annoying accidental pop-ups.

Two bugs reported - we have fixed one, restoring the ability to switch between desktop and mobile versions. The second. namely the loss of right click to open new tabs affects IE8 + IE9 users - just under six per cent of our readers, We know how to fix it - and it’s on our to do list. We’ll get this out before the end of next week.

Bye, bye print article icon - rarely used, not coming back. We still support this feature - so you are welcome to get hacking. *

Here is a checklist of the changes we have made.

Grey (mostly)  axed from colour palette  -  site is probably too monochrome now - but where better place to start than black and white?

Top ad moved  -  to get more space-for and attention for editorial content.

Expanding section nav  - to make content more accessible

Fixed navbar  - an aide memoire to encourage people to explore site

Footer  - more logical home for many links

Tidied up the right column  - We think it is easier to navigate.

Pics at the top of nearly all stories  -  visual is good, right?

Removed left column in the story page  - declutter

Reduced number of “teaser” units at bottom of story page  - declutter

Social media buttons and tags moved   - more logical places on the page

Front page headline carousel  - rotating teasers, are they effective? Let's A/B test.

Removed tabs and content buttons  - tried to make content accessible.-

Feature removed - most commented   - will be unpopular with some - but ignored / unused by vast majority. We aim to rethink this feature - but at a later date.

Feature removed print article - not used - This is not coming back

[J. R. Hartley]

Fucking shit

No need to go all Office 2013 on us. Fuck me this is grim.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Fucking shit

You appear to have changed your prose style since the Art of Fly Fishing, Mr. Hartley.

Office 13? Really?

[Gert Leboski]

Re: Fucking shit

Well played DrewC.

[Jim 59]

Love it, well done

This is indeed the biggest scandal since the great variable-width rumpus of '05 or whenever it was. Saw it this morning, nice surprise, think it looks nice. I like the old blue headlines being changed to black. And the header being shrunk and a bit less "Daily Sport" too. And it's quick. Not so keen on the pop-up pictures at the top but what the hell, why not. Consider making the font for the main headline a touch smaller, given we all have big screens now.

It is quite surprising that such a nice job was done by an "in-house team". Oh, and about that...

In addition, "Redesign v2" is coming in 2015 and is likely to involve an agency that can guide us through-

NO! Your own team clearly knows what it is doing.

[AJ MacLeod]

Re: Love it, well done

There's always one, isn't there? I can only conclude that you're either viewing the site with a screen reader or completely insane.

[Rusty 1]

Re: Fucking shit

Yep, right down to the "menu" entries in fecking caps.

Going back a few years, one Margaret Calvert was employed to make our road signs easily readable. Through the clever use of both upper and lower cases letters, with ascenders and descenders, most words were immediately visually recognisable by their shape, quite often without having to read the words themselves.

Now, 50 odd years on, in the next millennium, this CAPS LOCK SHITE returns.

Mankind is doomed.

[Gert Leboski]

Re: Fucking shit

I wish I could upvote your response more.

Whilst I don't necessarily agree with you, the concise, blunt response, first in the queue of real commentards, just made me crack up. Thank you Mr Hartley. :-D

[ashdav]

Re: Fucking shit

Quick, Modern, Fresher.

Hmm... So that will be..

Quick - flatter (no graphics to render)

Modern - (following the sheep)

Fresher - (it looks like a fucking phone)

Also looks like a wall of text. Why do you need consultants to to tell you this is WRONG?

[Jamie Jones]

ARGGGGGGGGGGGH!

Sorry, it's horrible.

I actually thought my browser had loaded the site without the stylesheet.

How about instead putting resources into making the forum work properly -- highlights/notifications of replies / new comments etc.

[Hoppy]

Re: ARGGGGGGGGGGGH!

Its dreadful.

Like Jamie I had to check I had the correct version of site I thought I had loaded the one for idiots,

"Pics at the top of nearly all stories - visual is good, right?" NO it bloody well isn't. I suspect most of your readers are literate and can understand the meaning of an article quite well with out requiring pictures. Although I do forget what a mouse is or struggle to visualise a switch without some form of memory jogger.

That's not including any comments re fixed width etc. that my fellow posters have covered.

We (the readers) are not fools and I suspect will dislike the "new and improved" style immensely.

Oh yes while I'm posting- Please bring back the carousel. It was probably the most endearing feature of the front page bringing articles I mas have otherwise missed to my attention..

[Mage]

Re: ARGGGGGGGGGGGH!

Images TOO BLOODY BIG, pardon my Klatchian.

[Steve Evans]

Re: ARGGGGGGGGGGGH!

Ooooh, that's a point... I might be able to fix it (on the desktop at least) with some abuse in tampermonkey.

BTW, what's the android mobile app like? Has it got any better? Last time I tried it it didn't last an hour before the bin summoned.

[(AMPC) Anonymous and mostly paranoid coward]

Re: Fucking shit

Not too impressed from my tiny laptop screen. Miss being able to quickly scan the articles with just a discreet headliner on top. Plus I really hate flash warnings. So I am not sure this will catch on but appreciate the effort. Keep trying.

[nuclearstar]

Re: Fucking shit

I hate the new site to be honest. Its terrible, reminds me of those websites like buzzfeed.

The annoying navigation bar at the top needs to go too. And why is the page so small on my widescreen monitor, I got a widescreen so I could fit more on it, not to have white space everywhere

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Fucking shit

My sentiments entirely. Utterly horrendous, roll it back ASAP.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

I'm fed up with fixed width sites on my Full HD screen - wasted space on sides & unecessary scrolling.

Please consider reverting to the original Reg dynamic width one of olden times please.

Cheers

[Jeff Deacon]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Equally, I often read ElReg on a narrower than usual (these days) screen, and must constantly scroll horizontally to see what is going on. Please record my vote to restore dynamic width coding.

[Piro]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Clearly designed for a tablet held in portrait with such a narrow design persisting: my main complaint about most sites today. They've forgotten we all are forced into wider screens...

[Yes Me]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

BAD Vulture! BAD!

Um, this confirms my experience that web site makeovers always make sites worse, especially when objectives like "modern and fresher" are involved. It is now harder to spot the lead stories, harder to quickly whip down the page looking for interesting stories, and also it's visually boring. All worse, nothing better that I can see.

[Geoff Johnson]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Lose the fixed nav bar and it would be OK.

Fixed content is a waste of space, especially on small screens.

[JeffyPoooh]

Where's the bloody Start button gone??

LOL.

It's fine. Looks a bit more like a newspaper.

At least there are no Tiles. Thank you.

[Mark 65]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

I still see we have no full time SSL option so the login form is delivered up by http and is susceptible to on-the-fly shenanigans as detailed in one of the many articles on web security trumpeted at El Reg. Practising that which is preached would be a healthy start before dicking around with look and feel.

[web_bod]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

1999 has called they want their fugly portal layout back - seriously WHAT were you thinking - it's an abomination - particularly against the bloody geckos you have plastered all over the background - I thought the Guardian was bad - but Jesus Christ - this layout is so noisy - have you never considered usability?

It's awful.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: El Reg Redesign - what a f&^*&^ mess!

Net result of your changes: After a refresh, it takes me several minutes paging up and down to work out if there is any new content that I might want to read. It is now nearly impossible to determine which links I've already visited and which not.

With the previous setup, the headlines of sorties I'd already visited were red -- ie. nice contrast to black == easily seen. Now they're just very slightly lighter grey.

I have a 1920x1080 screen -- hardly exotic.

Of that screen, excluding my browsers screen furniture, an area of 1860x840 is available to the register to use.

Of that 450x840 to left is blank;

410x840 to the right is blank;

1000x180 is the top-of-screen invariant stuff logo etc.;

665x430 is the pic and head line of the "Top Story" (As decided by who?) that I've either already read, or wasn't interested in when it first appeared.

334x490 are more "top stories" (Decided by who?) that I've already seen; or wasn't interested in.

334x170 are "Most read". (Why do I care?) that I've already seen; or didn't care about when they first appeared. What am I supposed to do? Change my mind because other people read them?

665x215 Potentially new stories.

So, that means just 8.94% of the usable screen real estate is actually used for something I might want to read.

Now, you'd think that after I page down, that would increase to 665x840 -- a whole 35% -- but no! Because 435x160 is given over to a reminder to DONT MISS another of your puerile knocking the BBC stories that I WASN'T INTERESTED IN TEH FIRST TIME AROUND; AND STIILL AIN'T!

And 665x170 has 3 completely meaningless pictures to 3 more stories that I've either read; OR WASN'T INTERESTED IN THE FIRST TIME THEY APPEARED.

Like I said in the subject:What an f'ing mess.

For over 10 years I've been here every day; for between 10 and 18 hours per day; refreshing the screen every 10 or 15 minutes; reading what I'm interested in and skipping what I'm not.

Upshot: I will either: make the effort to write a local (Opera: View->Style->User mode CSS) to:

a) discard (visibility: hidden;) all the repetitious crap that occupies 50% of my screen;

b) expand the story_row divisions to fill my screen;

Or, I will simply throw the tab that has occupied a pinned position in my browser ever since Opera first had tabs and allowed you to pin them; and just forget this place existed.

Because as is, this place has just become too much like hard work to follow.

"quick, modern and fresher" NOT!

Try "pinched, repetitive and forced". Ramming "your choices" and "the social consensus" down my throat. Pathetic. Utterly pathetic.

[BrowserUk]

Re: El Reg Redesign - How to fix it!

This is what they send me: http://imgbin.org/images/21306.jpg

This is what I now see: http://imgbin.org/images/21307.jpg

No huge white left margins; No teasers; no statics; no large_story; no story_list; no DONT MISS; no STORY GRID IMG; no right col; no spotlight; no sponlinks; no crumbtrail; no social btns; no follow btns top; no story rhs more;

And with jscript off; none of those stupid popup menus other have talked of but I've never seen.

Unvisited links in light blue; visited link if faded red.

Ain't perfect yet -- haven't worked out a way to use the full width of my screen yet; but so much better than the crap they pulled. I see everything I want to see -- eg. the stories -- and none of the repetitive crap.

And, cos they forced my had NO ADS!

(If your an Opera user and wanna know how; mail me!)

[CTM]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Very BBC news and co. So much white space it hurts my eyes. Why does every website redesign make my desktop / laptop look like a tablet / smartphone?

I'm a techie. I'm like a mushroom. I'm in the dark and fed... even by my favourite websites :(

[Fullbeem]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Needs a night mode then. A fellow dark room techie

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Two things I would like to see:

1. A by-line on the front page so I don't accidentally read anything by the likes of Orlowski* and Page.

2. A better way of changing account details such as email addresses.

* To be fair, it's fairly easy to spot Orlowski's drivel as the headline usually contains the words "BBC", "Freetard" or "Open Rights Group".

[The Other Steve]

Bylines +1. Dark mode +1

I also would like this feature, though for precisely the opposite reason, viz I would like to be able to quickly locate pieces by Orlowski and Page for perusal - and for the hilarity of commentard froth that typically appears below them - while avoiding the febrile ramblings of Hamill - who, unlikely as it seems, was apparantly molested by an iPhone at some point in his life - and likewise the fruity flavoured 'tard dribble that tends to appear below those.

Other than that, it looks good as long as long as I close one eye, squint with the other and avoid looking at it inside or indeed anywhere outside of direct sunlight. The contrast! It burns!

[Dr Stephen Jones]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

I usually enjoy Lewis and Andrew's stories even when I disagree with them.

Can we also have a filter so I don't need to read whiney easily-offended commentards like Mahatma Coat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Can we also have a filter so I don't need to read whiney easily-offended commentards like Mahatma Coat?

I'm actually pretty hard to offend. I'm just picky about what I read.

[big_D]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

The drop-down teasers are annoying, I click on a tab, move mouse down the page to start scrolling and the menu pops up for a fraction of a second, then disappears again. Very distracting.

Otherwise I like the cleaner layout, fewer distractions. I haven't used the home page for a while, I run your RSS feed through Feedly and pick out the stories that are of interest. I looked at the home page out of interest and it looks okay, but a bit "conformist".

As to using the screen width, I sort of agree with the comment about a proportional design. I have a Full HD monitor and a 3200 pixel wide 12" display, but I only ever use 50% of the width (snap to the side of the screen) and the design is a tick too wide for that.

[Robert Helpmann??]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

The drop-down teasers are annoying, I click on a tab, move mouse down the page to start scrolling and the menu pops up for a fraction of a second, then disappears again. Very distracting.

... except when it causes you to click on the wrong article, then it's a pain in the ass. I haven't started digging through articles yet today, but this is my first impression of the new design and it is not good.

EDIT: I didn't realize the menu is stuck at the top of the page in stories (why different from the main pages?), but now that I have had a chance to read a story, I find it to be utter... words fail me.

[Lyndon Hills 1]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

I'll echo the comment on drop down thingys. might get used to them but it took me a minute to be sure I'd opened in a new tab, not just opened in the same one. Seems to be fine in IE Win Phone 8.1.

[Anonymous Custard]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

We also can't seemingly now right-click and open the article in a new tab (at least under the IE9 I'm stuck with here at work), so it's back and forth into each article which is a pain.

Like most of the others above, really hating the new design look too, there was nothing wrong with the old one. Bring it back!

[Stuart Elliott]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

And still no concept that there are people reading your site with 4K monitors - the white gaps down each side are now bigger than the bloody content I'm trying to read FFS.

"In addition, "Redesign v2" is coming in 2015 and is likely to involve an agency that can guide us through a more rigorous ground-up redesign"

You might want to link the commentards to beta.theregister.co.uk when you're doing that, to save all this gnashing of teeth - let your users be your QC department.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Stuart Elliott

the white gaps down each side are now bigger than the bloody content I'm trying to read

Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, what would you fill the white space with exactly? Massively wide lines are unreadable. More ads maybe?

The comp that I'm reading with at the moment has a 1920x1080 screen but I keep my browser window set around 1100 pixels wide. Trying to follow a 1920 pixel-wide line of text would be a nightmare.

[Stuart Elliott]

Re: @Stuart Elliott

Well, having it so it doesn't look quite so barren, as per how it is now at 4K: http://i.imgur.com/lokr8fX.png

Even if it uses just 20% more white space, at whatever given resolution is used, would be a good start.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

> And still no concept that there are people reading your site with 4K monitors

What do you need so many monitors for?

[John 62]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

I came to the reg and there was only ONE HUGE STORY.

Bring back the carousel.

I found the last version was great for discovering articles. Too many storage stories, but the carousel at the top and the strip a couple of rows down highlighted a few stories for me I was most likely to read. Now there is only ONE STORY and it takes up my WHOLE BROWSER WINDOW!

BBC Sport's YELLOW redesign wasn't pretty, but it was mostly functional and highlighted the top stories well

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

As with the vast majority of opinion here - please back this out ASAP.

Who signed off this grande heap de merde during change control? Back them out too!

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Please, please get rid of that fecking expanding navbar. Pictures thrown in your face and vanishing any time the mouse hapens to brush by. Horrible.

"make content more accessible"

I assume that this is some novel use of "accessible", not the customary one of "making it easier to use for prople with disabilities", because it sure as f**k doesn't follow those guidelines.

For much of the rest, there's always AdBlock.

[Stretch]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Aw you broke the register

[Old_timer]

Not liked but for good reasons

I use having been using The Register most days for several years to keep up with new developments in a rapid, easily digested way.I don't like the redesign because:

1) I don't need the 'Pics at the top of nearly all stories'. They take up room and very rarely add anything of value. 2) It used to be easy to see which stories I had read because they were marked in red. Now they're much less obvious. 3) The bit that I'm interested in (the 3 columns of headlines) now takes up around one third of my screen space with nothing at all on the left side.

You're right. Nobody likes change but at least I can offer a rationale for my dislike of the new site.

[brigfam]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

What do you mean "Feature removed print article - not used". I use this all the time to print a multi-page article in a single print job. I also use it to consolidate a multi-age article into a single stream so that I can scan it quickly. That is how I found this feature removal today.

[Fungus Bob]

Re: Printer friendly removed

"What do you mean "Feature removed print article - not used"."

You can get to the printer friendly version by appending print.html at the end of the article URL or by inserting "/Print" before the date part of the URL.

To print:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/14/building_a_lee_enfield/

append print.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/14/building_a_lee_enfield/print. html

which takes you to:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2014/12/14/building_a_lee_enfield/

[Squander Two]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Could you please add a delay to the appearance of the giant menu when we mouseover the top bar? I doubt I'm the only person who moves the mouse up there to navigate between tabs and move the window around, and every time I do half the page is immediately covered in crap.

As for the rest, there are all sorts of annoyances, but I generally assume I'll adjust to these things.

[Conor Turton]

0/10, sack the designer.

Its a bit shit.

[Identity]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Yeah, hate it. Too much white space BS. You guys getting old and NEED BIGGER TYPE? I may be able to navigate after I find everything, but IMHO, 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it.' Back, back you crazy beasts! BTW, need "print article"

[Steve Evans]

Re: You guys getting old and NEED BIGGER TYPE?

Oh thank god it wasn't just me... My first reaction was to check I didn't have a zoom of 150% set!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Well, like everyone else I can see I think this is worse, although it seems well-intentioned.

Two obvious things: The pictures are *too big*: I come to read content not to look at a picture and see the first paragraph of the content. The print article button was also actually useful if you wanted to send content to pocket or a similar tool as it showed articles on one page, though obviously you probably don't want that.

[John Mangan]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Surely after ten pages of mostly vitriolic bile and horror the lead article on the home page should be 'Reg Readers HATE new design' - with a suitably humongous and irrelevant picture of course!

[pjfraser]

Re: El Reg Redesign - please no pictures that are not relevent

Pictures that add to the story are fine but there seems to be a policy of adding a picture to each article. In most cases the pictures are not relevant and are anoying

[Chris G]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

1/2 second delay excellent!

Now lose the big pic at the top of each article, scrolling past it is making my finger ache.Ta!

[Anomalous Cowturd]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Agreed, but it's still way too white.

</Toggles RedShift on early>

[Bob Vistakin]

"Affects IE8 + IE9 users only"

So if quality browsers are unaffected what's the problem? You also gonna sort out that scrolling glitch on Netscape 1, and how about the lack of images in Lynx?

[mafoo]

So much useless white space

Tiny font with masses of whitespace. <sadface>

Overly massive lead article photo so i have to scroll a whole page to see any of the articles. <sadface>

The old site had tones of information easily digestible in a small space. Thats the main reason i kept coming back to the reg. With the new layout its a chore to read.

You've tried to have style over substance and have ended up with neither.

[asdf]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comments here

What I have to say has already been said for most part. Basically the new site redesign is total dog shit. Its distracting and makes it harder to get to what I care about, the information in the articles. I hate UX preaching webbies.

[mercurivs]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comments here

You should have a single responsive design, one that works on any size screen from a smartphone upwards, not a fixed width design and a separate mobile site.

And speaking of the mobile site, it cannot ever have been set up properly, as I only see the desktop on my phone anyway.

[Mike Taylor]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comments here

Visual is good - sometimes. For your highly literate, frequently dogmatic, consequently argumentative, sometimes provoking and always provoked readership, it is a distraction*. One of the major consequences of your re-design is that I can see less content when I land on your page (epic fail), my eyes are dragged to a usually redundant image - and I have to scroll further to start reading a story. None of these things are good, although they will have the added effect of *looking* good in your metrics, as they'll increase the amount of time on your site.

* Unless it is offering up essential photography in support of, say, a new range of small laptops, in which case the bigger the better.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comments here

I use the PRINT article all the time. Without it, The Reg will be MUCH more difficult to share with colleagues who will NOT click on some hotlink. I embed the whole print article in text and THEN they will go to the site to see the graphics. The people who took off the PRINT icon are NOT thinking of anyone outside of their narrow community of always online cyber surfers. This will directly harm my ability to share Reg articles and widen the audience.

Really sad redesign. Looks like light-brained millennials with limited large organization experience decided to have a go at redesign without looking at of the research on online scanning and infor absorption. IF they had, they would have discovered that, while people peer at pictures in print, they read first online IF they do not have to scroll to scan. So The Reg's three column quick catchy headline was in fact the best design for attraction and info transmission with minimal effort. Daily I scan, click to tab for print option, and send to my colleagues who will not, out of security consciousness, click on any hotlink OR copy and paste to read something. Redesigning both the print and the three columns (not including sidebar) has just reduced the ease of use of The Reg by about half.

Plus, now you look like WIRED and the pix take too much space on the view screen. WHOM did you hire for this redesign? The REG is a knowledge source, not a visual playground for those who do not have the responsibility to inform a wider world uninterested in spending hours perusing the site. IF the print icon remains gone AND you cannot think of a way to keep the very useful three column quick take format, even I as a long term Reg reader will wander off to sites that demand less of my work day just to scan, print, and share. This is how info sites die....someone gets bored and blasts the value model for reasons they have not researched or really understood.

cheers, CC1D

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comments here

What part of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" did El Reg not understand?

Time to charge up the cattle prod.

Specific problems?

Humungous pictures, even if they're relevant, blocking the top of every article.

Top of article link to comments now reduced to a wizened little appendage.

Adblock & Noscript probably shield me from come of the other problems.

[Martin E Rogers]

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comments here

Well, if you're into A/B testing then how about doing that between the old and new formats and see what you get? Echo the comments on caps lock menus and mouse-over graphics.

Yet another website falling prey to the "clean, fresh, modern" Flat UI and whitespace, whitespace everywhere antipattern. Only popular with web designers. Why don't you all just go snowboarding? Or alternatively, give us a 'density' option a la Gmail (after months of screams from users).

[Buzzword]

Mobile

I know there's m.theregister.co.uk for mobile, but it would be nice if the main site would auto-scale for narrow screens.

[Black Plague]

Re: Mobile

Yes, for the love of $DEITY, would you please auto-redirect mobile browsers to the mobile version or else start using responsive layout code (here's a lovely example: http://alistapart.com/d/responsive-web-design/ex/ex-site-FINAL.html)!!!!

It's the second decade of the 21st century already! Most of us are reading El Reg on our phones and none of us want to constantly pinch-and-zoom in or be forced to use Mobile Safari for the reader view feature.

[b166er]

Re: Mobile

Indeed,it feels like Uncle Reg is actually trolling.

A redesign WITHOUT being responsive??!? Srsly wtf?

I'm no web design guru, but even I could make this site responsive in about 5 minutes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Mobile

Responsive in 5 mins? You are hired!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Mobile

5 mins may be one heck of a push but the style of site is very open to a few media queries to turn it responsive very easily as it is all laid in blocks which can just stack on each other - does depend on your backend CMS of course and how that has been made.

The best thing (for you) is that you can insert the ads at relevant places as well which done well could give better exposure to said advertisers, probably more so than on a desktop - way more than your m. site at the very least.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Mobile

> I'm no web design guru, but even I could make this site responsive in about 5 minutes.

Did it ever occur to you that there might be a correlation between your stated skill level and your perceived ability to carry out the task you mention?

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Mobile

He was promising to make a site which responds in 5mins - shouldn't be difficult to acheive that whatever your skill level.

( probably with a mixture of perl,Access-VB and ftp-ing changed pages to a server on each request )

[Dave 126]

Re: Mobile

Chrome on Android, on 4.1" screen: Reg works okay, main page is a bit of a faff (pan down, right, left, down etc). Double tapping on text in articles makes it big enough to read, and is easy to do. Writing a post in the forums is a bit of a faff.

On 4.7" screen: ditto.

[Mephistro]

Re: Mobile (@AC)

"...there might be a correlation between your stated skill level and your perceived ability to carry out the task..."

You mean, like, an inverse correlation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Mobile

So we could go adaptive tomorrow. However ... advertisers pay a fraction for mobile eyeballs if they are looking at mobile site - and pay decent rates for ads on mobile eyeballs on desktop site. There is nothing underhand about this - but it is crazy. We need to figure out a sane way to do this without self-harming.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Mobile

The biggest problem is the top, where is the ad and the header where is the logo.

Consider combining them by placing the logo at left and ad at right, at the moment it looks uncomplete.

Maybe will be good to make slider instead only one story with big picture. Another option is to plase the top stories at the right of the big picture

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Mobile

Sorry, maybe I am misunderstanding, but I fail to see why advertising revenue is any reason not to go responsive.

The whole point of a responsive site is that the server kicks out the same code to all devices. It's the device that decides how to display it, using javascript and various CSS rules. So not only can you display the same ads on a responsive site, it's really the same site - it's just that the device formats a few things differently depending on the screen size.

Basically, it's not a mobile site, it's the same site served to everyone.

The 5 minute estimate was a little bit of an exaggeration by the other guy, but seriously, in less than a day you could wire up Foundation or Bootstrap to your page template, few CSS class tweaks on your page templates, and you'd have a responsive site that means I don't need to use your god-awful Windows Phone app which hasn't shown comments since I got the phone 3 months ago.

[JeffyPoooh]

Re: Mobile

"...would you please auto-redirect mobile browsers to the mobile version..."

DISAGREE.

I almost always prefer the full desktop version of virtually all websites. Mobile versions are too often daft. Make it trivial to avoid horrible and limiting Mobile pages, even if we use "mobile" devices.

The other day I was auto-redirected to the Mobile version of a website with infinite scroll, the bottom of the page kept getting further away with each scroll. Guess where the 'View Desktop Version' button was! Bottom of the page!! I could almost catch a glimpse of it with each scroll, just before another dozen items were inserted between me and it. Impossible!

What do you call a Web Developer that graduated bottom of their class?

"Mobile Web Developer"

[Jamie Jones]

Re: Mobile

"Yes, for the love of $DEITY, would you please auto-redirect mobile browsers to the mobile version or ...."

NO NO NO NO NO <u>NO!</u>

My tablet has a 7 inch screen, less than a foot from my face, and a resolution of 1900x1200. I can therefore cope with more detail than many desktop usersl yet some sites insist on sending me to a crappy dumbed down version, with text you could read a mile away.

Evil. I thought the crappy practice of browser sniffing and presuming the users environment with fixed-size layouts died around the time I.E. lost it's grip..... I was wrongwrong.

[Mage]

Re: Mobile

It's rubbish on a 4:3 15" 1600 x 1200 seriously un-mobile laptop too!

[Dave Griffiths]

Your redesign stinks, sorry, but it does

I can't open windows in another tab anymore which adds a batch of clicks. I used to be able to throw all the articles in tabs and then get to them as I wanted. Now I have to read the main page, choose an article, click back to the main page.

If it stays like this I won't be visiting anymore it takes way too much time.

[VinceH]

Re: Your redesign stinks, sorry, but it does

"I can't open windows in another tab anymore which adds a batch of clicks. I used to be able to throw all the articles in tabs and then get to them as I wanted. Now I have to read the main page, choose an article, click back to the main page."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/headlines.atom and something like FeedDemon Pro is your friend.

[VinceH]

Re: Your redesign stinks, sorry, but it does

"http://www.theregister.co.uk/headlines.atom and something like FeedDemon Pro is your friend."

I don't normally comment on up/downvotes on my posts - but this time I'll make an exception because I'm a little perplexed as to why my comment has received a couple of downvotes.

The only obvious thing that strikes me as a possible reason is that the downvoters can't see the connection between not being able to open new articles in separate tabs, and using the feed and a reader. In which case: Depending on your settings, when you click on an an article in the reader, it can be opened in a new tab in your browser. This can happen regardless of how El Reg's front page is set up, and is entirely under the control of your own set up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Re: Your redesign stinks, sorry, but it does

Well you shall have an upvote from me!

[VinceH]

Re: Your redesign stinks, sorry, but it does

"Well you shall have an upvote from me!"

Which promptly got you a downvote from someone else.

El Reg commentards are a weird bunch - which, yes, does include me. ;)

[chivo243]

Re: Your redesign stinks, sorry, but it does

Who gets the upvote? OP or the poster just above you? Due to the lag in posts being posted, you sometimes get nudged out by a post to the OP by someone else, and it looks like you're comment is for someone else, and make no sense about their post. Maybe these little functionalities could be addressed before adding more eye candy?

[Mark 85]

Re: Your redesign stinks, sorry, but it does

Dave,

Ya' gotta' right click now to open in new tab. PITA.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Your redesign stinks, sorry, but it does

> Ya' gotta' right click now to open in new tab. PITA.

I can Ctrl+LeftClick as usual to open in new tab. Firefox 24.7 ESR on OpenSUSE.

[Black Plague]

Re: Your redesign stinks, sorry, but it does

Yeah, that was a dumb choice.

Chrome and Firefox still allow me to right-click and open links in new tabs, just not IE.

[Anonymous Coward]

What browser are you using?

Sounds like our first bug report , Dave. We have reproduced this in IE8 and IE9 - and will fix.

We do not support IE7 and lower.

[Mephistro]

Re: What browser are you using?

Holy shit! Time between reading bug report and identifying the issue: 15 minutes!!!

Kudos to you, DrewC.

[Mephistro]

Re: Your redesign stinks, sorry, but it does

Hmmm... At least 18 IE commentards -as of now- using IE. Prepare the pitchforks and torches!!!

Disclaimer: 'Devil Icon' used for comedic value only. 'Joke Icon' would be, arguably, more appropriate . ;-)

[MyNetHandle]

Re: Your redesign stinks, sorry, but it does

I am sadly one of the 'IE commentards', but this is due to restrictions of working where I do. We don't get the option of alternative browsers, and since El Reg asked for feedback, outlining problems with the website in IE seems totally appropriate.

[Mage]

Re: Your redesign stinks, sorry, but it does

I hate the change, but my middle button / mouse wheel still works in firefox to open new tab.

[JeffyPoooh]

Re: Your redesign stinks, sorry, but it does

Android - hold link, select Open in a New Tab.

Still works.

That's my method too. Stack up some tabs for reading.

[handleoclast]

Re: Your redesign stinks, sorry, but it does

I have to agree with just about every criticism I've seen.

Failure of middle-click to throw to a new tab is absolutely indefensible. They had to deliberately disable it, whether that was the desired end or just an accidental by-product of some useless crap "modern" web design effect they wanted.

But, I have to say, middle-click is working for me (Exploder 11/Win 7 - not my usual choice but it's what I happen to have in front of me right now). Maybe they have already fixed this or maybe it's whatever browser you're using.

If it still isn't working for you, you could try control-left-click, which on some versions of some browsers is equivalent to a middle click.

[petur]

The top 'article' (current one looks like Canon ad to me) takes waaaay too much space, I have to scroll down half a page to get to the list of articles (and that's on a big display). Same for the articles themselves.

Are you trying to copy the ugly and inefficient layouts of other sites? Please don't.

Why are new website designs going for bigger layouts - surely that's not the best way to handle big displays (which I got because I want to have multiple windows open - not easy when the websites start to scale too)

[I ain't Spartacus]

I'd like to make some conflicting points.

It all seems a bit big. I thought I'd accidentally done something to the zoom level of my browser for a minute. I'm sure the text just got a bit bigger. But the thing I notice is the space between the text. Have you upped the line spacing? It sort of makes the writing look a bit lonely. And of course means scrolling more.

Also on the subject of scrolling, although you've made your masthead smaller on the front page I can only see that, the banner ad and one single article. The headline is enormous, and the only picture is of a printer. Now if you're going into photo-journalism, then knock yourselves out and give us one giant piccie, so we scroll down to the articles having had our minds blown by an eyeful of beauty/shock/humour/cat. But instead what you've done is fill my screen with a picure of a very boring printer. Unless that's an advert for Canon - I don't really see the point of it. A thumbnail would be better.

I'd say maybe things are a bit too big. But on the other hand, I have very poor eyesight. But then I have glasses to magnify stuff, what I struggle with is lack of contrast. In my opinion you've been removing contrast for your last few re-designs, and it's making your website worse. Just like modern UI designers seem to be doing. Drop-shadows, putting buttons in boxes, using borders and/or coloured backgrounds for different bits of the screen layout to distinguish them, these are a few of my favourite things... And I'm very sad every time they're taken away.

So once I've clicked on your headlines, they go a hard to read grey. Couldn't you go for a different colour instead? Or just a slightly less washed out one. On comment threads you've got a very faint line in between posts, and it would be really nice if you could make that darker as well.

You have de-cluttered nicely.

Overall I'm quite happy with the re-design. But then I was happy with it before, and before your last redesign before that. In the end it's just a list of articles, and the articles are made up of words and pictures. So as long as they're reasonably well laid out and legible I'm happy. I'm not particularly interested in the fancy design aspect of things. It's the content I'm interested in, and that's why I come back. That and the vast, possibly suicidal, number of delicious pork pies you give away at your lectures... Thanks for Tuesday night, it was good fun.

[Triggerfish]

I have to agree the pictures at the front of the article are way to big.

Unless you automatically start redirecting to The Reg mobile site as well that and the top nav are going to be a real PITA on a phone.

[Vector]

Agreed on the size of the Headline article. And I really miss the old 5 article carousel. I don't know if that headline is supposed to change or not, but it only changed for me on a refresh.

Also agree that the article spacing is a bit wide.

[JeffyPoooh]

OMG!!! Where are the Comedy Thumbnail Pictures??

I love those Comedy Thumbnails!!

Colour me Sad if they're never to return.

[maffski]

[this space intentionally blank]

Lots of whitespace over here, it all looks a bit tablet/bootstrap generic.

Front page carousel - I appear to have been co-opted into the 'without' camp - I miss it already.

Don't Miss two column headline thing - I like that, but still lots of white space.

Over all, change. I've heard off it, sounded like an awful idea so I didn't try it.

[Andy Barker]

Re: [this space intentionally blank]

I agree - the border / spacing around articles on the home page is too large. Makes it look like it is designed for large fingers on small screens. But then the toolbar works on mouse-over, and not click.

Can't see anything in the change that I personally like, and plenty that I don't.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: [this space intentionally blank]

I don't like the carousel of news. Although I seem to be in the group that hasn't got it, so don't know if you've improved it.

I find it annoying that it moves when I'm halfway through reading the headline. So now I just ignore it, and scroll down the page where I'll find those stories anyway.

On the other hand, if it's not too huge, it doesn't affect me. So if some people like it, it's a good way for you to have more stories in the more valuable real-estate at the top of the page, and I can just scroll past it anyway. So what's not to like?

[Chris G]

Not broke

So why fix it?

However, the only thing I actually dislike is that after having clicked on the Banner to return to the Headlines page; every time I cross the navbar a load of headings jump out at me,VERY irritating.

Social media buttons ? Nobody likes me so I don't care! Aside from that everything looks fine.

[Martin Gregorie]

Re: Not broke

I agree with the first poster in this thread: the flashing as I slide my mouse over the second level menu bar on my way to the top-level bar is very irritating. I also dislike having pictures associated with the top-level menu bar hide the second level bar.

However, my main beef is that the contrast in colour between an unread article and one that has been read is far too small. It doesn't have to be as big a change as the old blue/scarlet switch, but the current black/dark grey switch is almost impossible to see at a glance: black/dull red (seen already) would make scanning for new articles a lot easier.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not broke

Same here.

The enormous pop-ups on mousing over the headlines is in danger of giving me an epileptic fit.

And the absolutely enormous headline picture, what on earth were you thinking?

To be honest, I liked it the way it was.

Out of curiosity, what prompted the revamp?

As someone said above, why fix what isn't broken?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not broke

Flash is evil and leads to obesity and hair loss, kill it now before it grows.

[FuzzyTheBear]

AH ! BUSTED

So i was right .. there's been a change and i posted before you had time to confess DrewC :D

Some readers DO pay attention you know .. I can resume drinking my beer .. i ain't hallucinating .. yet .. but working on it ;)

.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't shoot the messenger

Confess? It wasn't me...

[Johnny Canuck]

Have to agree with petur, the top article takes up too much room. The login bar, Reg banner, navigation bar and top article take up 3/4 of my screen on 1920x1080 monitor.

[Anonymous Coward]

Duly noted, However the issue raised is the top article only as the login bar, reg banner, masthead and nav bar combo is slightly thinner than before.

[Old69]

Hard on the eyes

Hard on the eyes - too much white, too much contrast. Too much scrolling - too much space - hard to take in the headline articles at a glance. Almost made me puke as I sat down with my dinner to catch up on the El Reg news. The site won't be my top bookmark any longer with this style.

[Mark Allen]

Re: Hard on the eyes

Agree with the harshness of the white - far too bright. The old site was heavy on the all white everywhere.... this is getting worse. The huge areas of white are actually leading to headaches for me. I often find if I am trying to read El-Reg at the end of the day, the brightness of the screen eventually means I have to leave the computer.

Too many sites have been doing this lately. Going brighter with the white and shrinking the text. I'm going to have to learn some custom CSS I guess to try and tone down the glare.

(Ouch - I am already having problems on this page... I'm not actually going to be able to manage my end of day read...)

Also not a fan of the pop-down menus. They are a bit too fast as I keep having to move my mouse away from the menu bar as I accidentally sweep past it.

[Adrian Harvey]

Re: Hard on the eyes

Slightly off topic, but I have found f.lux http://justgetflux.com/ - which adjusts the white colour temperature of the screen to match your lighting at night - makes huge improvements to my eye strain level at night. It's free, so worth a try.

[HywelPhillips]

Re: Hard on the eyes

Yeh, me too. It is giving me eyestrain.

Too much white space, the fixed width layout isn't helpful on a 30" screen, the menu bar with popups is annoying.

But most of all it is just hard to read for my poor aging eyes :(

[Ben Tasker]

Re: Hard on the eyes

Agreed, far too much white for me, it's giving me a headache.

For the record, I'm only 27, so it isn't and age thing.

[Trevor_Pott]

Re: Hard on the eyes

I agree. I am currently mocking up a black theme as part of my CSS overrides for El Reg. I can't take all the white. Sadly, there's no ability to choose between various colour schemes in and apply to your profile while logged in, so it's "create overrides, then distribute to every bloody browser I use".

Why don't more sites offer black themes? White on light on dark is way easier for some of us to read than dark on light. Must be getting old. Bad eyes.

[breakfast]

Re: Hard on the eyes

I concur, not keen on the whole "not clear where the column of actual content begins and ends" thing- not only is there too much whitespace by a ridiculous amount, but it makes the content look ragged and untidy. The biggest thing I miss about the previous design is the colour outside of the content space. The old grey background worked well for me.

[Spoonsinger]

WTF have you done to this site?

It looks all crappy circa 2011 tablet orientated. (Basically the same sort of kak Ars Technica did and that was - and still is - just pants).

[Trevor_Pott]

Re: WTF have you done to this site?

Ars looks a lot better if you log in and play with the settings some. You can move to a much more dense display of the articles, and have them in list form rather than that stupid verge-like tile format. Plus, dark theme, yay!

Ars does a lot wrong, but they do science reporting right and they offer some flexibility in the display of their site. Gotta like that.

[CTM]

Re: WTF have you done to this site?

So we should expect to login to El Reg and Ars and experiment to make it look good? Shouldn't it look good by default?

[G2]

ow..my eyes.. what in the world made you change that nicely compact layout? looks like a tornado messed the site :(

[Anonymous Coward]

no please, why change? been coming here for at least 8 years a few times a day specifically because it was easy to take in all the bits we needed..now it looks like another wannabe-web3.0 poo-palace.

[AndrueC]

Too much space taken up by the 'age' field.

Possibly just too much whitespace overall. Don't like the lead headline - it's the only article I can see on my laptop screen when I first land on the site.

[45RPM]

Aww. You made it match iOS 7. Was that intentional?

[Marco Fontani]

Damn, busted!

[Wizardofaus]

No. Just no....

Design by the same team who did the new Guarinad site?

Same problems as they have:

- probably great for people looking at the site on a phone, but really difficult to read on a decent sized screen in a small room. I just can't get far enough away to view without doing 2x zoom out, then it has acres of empty white space either side.

- huge picture that consumes acres of real estate. If I am looking for pictures I go to a photo site.

Nice red rollovers though. Very 1990's. Sorry. Did I say nice?

[Ketlan]

Re: No. Just no....

'Design by the same team who did the new Guarinad site?'

Yep, looks like it and they both look like shit. I put this on the same level as the change in Office to that bloody awful ribbon - no-one likes it, it's crap to use and we're probably stuck with it no matter what we say.

[Michael Shelby]

Expanding section nav

I'm not a fan. When I read the last line of text on the screen and hit PageDn, I expect to be able to see that line of text again at the top of the screen. Now that line of text is hidden behind the expanding menu! Maybe I'm odd, but I like being able to re-read the last few words of that line to make sure I didn't accidentally scroll two pages instead of one...

[Mark 85]

Don't talke this personally

To much jumble. Everything seems scattered. The top article and top stories too big. The flashing menu bar is very AOLish/Huffington Postish and distracting. Put the gray back to separate the article area from everything else as the ads, etc. Maybe some separator bars on the right to separate the wheat from the chaff. And, the gray for "read" articles is part of the too monochrome.

Yep....looks like the Huffington Post and AOL were used as templates. Really a pity.

You get points for trying, though.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Don't talke this personally

"You get points for trying, though."

No they don't. It wasn't broke so they shouldn't have fixed it.

[Nya]

Don't like

Nope, in the don't like crowd. The old page was much nicer.

[Kevin 6]

Looks like crap

Should fire the guy who did it. Preferably out of a cannon into a brick wall.

Hell do the same to the person who suggested it.

I thought the site got pwned by some ha><ors when I first saw it, but then thought they usually have better layouts.

[tfewster]

Pics at the top of nearly all stories - visual is good, right?

No. Takes up too much space and isn't relevant to the the article.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Pics at the top of nearly all stories - visual is good, right?

I don't mind pics if they are directly related to the article, are part of the story and unique to that story. Library pics ought to be a big no-no. Please don't do the BBC trick of sticking the standard library photo of some network cables on every IT story. It doesn't add anything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Pics at the top of nearly all stories - visual is good, right?

... but if you really *have* to put in some sort of image, make it a really thin banner one, and it'd be way less annoying.

[Barry Rueger]

Crap Crap Crap Crap

Call me old school but I like to use these old fashioned things called WORDS to get information.

GIANT pictures are not words, and in 99% of cases do not add any useful INFORMATION. Even if they're real purdy.

WHITE SPACE is not words, and if the page has more white space than words, it is wasting my time.

And oh yeah, in case this is also planned: VIDEO is a horrid way to get across information, and it is exceedingly rare for me to watch any embedded video.

I've been a Reg reader for more years than I can remember, and it's one of maybe two or three sites that I have consistently kept open in my browser for all of those years.

If you go for the stupid eye-candy instead of content I'll be gone.

(Paris because, like this redesign, it's all about style, not substance.)

[Oninoshiko]

Re: Crap Crap Crap Crap

total agreement. I thought someone had deleted the CSS.

Ditch all the random pictures in the middle of the article list

set the size and position of article headlines to be easily scanable with the eyes.

LOSE THE OBNOXIOUS POPUP MENU

No story should take up half the screen, I don't care how good/bad your cromebook printing was

Honestly, we could probably do without the righthand menu.

for the love of all that is holy, make it scale dynamically to width.

Would like the contrast between clicked and non-clicked articles to be back to normal.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Crap Crap Crap Crap

"I thought someone had deleted the CSS."

Me too!! It looks like that horrible "Modern" design MS have gone with.

[PhilBuk]

Re: Crap Crap Crap Crap

Totally agree - ditch pictures and video (if planned, we know it is).

PLEASE PLEASE get rid of the effing pop-up menu bar!!!!

Phil.

[Barry Rueger]

Re: Crap Crap Crap Crap

Actaully, I'll admit that it could be worse.

They could abandon the forums and install Disqus instead.

[Kevin 6]

Re: Crap Crap Crap Crap

Barry PLEASE don't give them any bright ideas.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Crap Crap Crap Crap

"PLEASE don't give them any bright ideas."

Well, if they did it would probably solve a difficult problem - whether to continue visiting this site or not. Disqus would certainly tip the balance.

[Kilroy2k1]

Do Not Want!

Not impressed. its too mono, not enough to break up the overbearing whitespace. it looks like its leaning towards microsoft's "square, pastel and designed by 3yr old's" look. It didn't work for them, it likely wont for you.

[Arthur the cat]

Only possible comment

500 The Bees They're In My Eyes!

[VinceH]

I don't see the front page, since I use the feed - but some of the changes within articles are a little annoying.

The navigation bar is fine - but the thumbnails menu (the expanding section nav) that appears when your mouse is over it obscures the article you are trying to read. It isn't a problem if the article I've chosen to read isn't the topmost one in my reader - but if it is, I have to move the mouse before I start scrolling.

You have a similarly expanding (and therefore obscuring) pop up info box for the article author - so if I need to move the mouse to avoid the expanding section nav, I have to remember to move it such that that link isn't going to end up under the mouse as I scroll the page.

While neither are the end of the world, they don't strike me as being examples of good UI design.

Of the rest of the changes listed, of the stuff I've actually noticed, it's really just aesthetics - and of the stuff I haven't noticed; I haven't noticed it because it doesn't affect me (perhaps because my starting point is the feed).

[channel extended]

Taken over?

The site now looks like it was taken over by the guy's in turtlenecks. Visual is NOT better. Next you'll be trying to shove video at visitors claiming that's more modern and hip. We don't do hip. I come to this site for news, not crap like this. Due to age, my vision is not what it used to be so I view this site magnified. Try that and see just how bad you made it. The question is will I stop coming due to the new layout, I don't know.

Guy's what happened to K.I.S.S.

[Anonymous Coward]

I swear I switched that webcam off.

How did you know what we are wearing?

[T. F. M. Reader]

Re: I swear I switched that webcam off.

The way you express yourselves conjures up an image in our minds... ;-)

[Anonymous Coward]

That Nav Bar!

The fucking thing expands on hover (and immediately at that), so as I move my mouse across the screen from the content area to the chrome (e.g., to click on another tab) or back from the chrome to the content, I end up with a screenful of irrelevant navigation links.

Expand on click, please, not hover. Also, have you tested with users having touchscreen devices (not necessarily mobile)?

[Florida1920]

The big picture

That huge graphic at the top of the home page is a waste of space, as is the BIG HEADLINE.

Not sure rearranging the page is an improvement. As someone who reads El Reg a few times a day, I got used to finding my way around. Learning to read the new layout doesn't add value IMO. Just like Playboy, most of us look at El Reg for the articles, not the pix. Unless they're graphics that add value. The new look won't drive me away, but it doesn't add anything to my desire to visit, either.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The big picture

> Just like Playboy, most of us look at El Reg for the articles, not the pix.

I thought that deserved an upvote. :-)

[CTM]

Re: The big picture

Word up! :)

[lawndart]

says:

When do we get the "lovely new makeover"?

Because we certainly don't have it now.

At first I thought I had inadvertently zoomed my browser. Imagine my consternation when the GIANT PRINTER image turned out to really be a GIANT PRINTER image.

Look, I only have a 1920 x 1080 screen. I would prefer it not to have to scroll down to find the articles.

And then scroll down even more to find the next row. And wonder why some articles are twice as wide as others.

Also my Opera speed dial only shows the GIANT PRINTER so I can't tell whether you have updated your articles which is a nuisance.

I'm all for experimentation. Try again.

[D Fife]

Nicely done

I hate to say it, but ... I really like what I've seen so far ;-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Nicely done

I like it. The red banner is a bit too red right now, but otherwise you've added some nice features.

Also, looks like you pissed off all the reg-tards at once today, which is always fun. Nice bit of trolling there!

Oh - when do we get some new comment icons? Sometime before the singularity occurs in 2045 I hope? Aren't these the same ones we've been using for 6-8 years now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Still no https? really wide margins

Tell me. Is your monitor rotated 90 degrees? Mine isn't. Surely your webserver knows that my display is 1600x900, not 800x900

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Still no https? really wide margins

Did my post get autoposted or did I inadvertently click Submit?

...continued... also while the ?new? font is fine, the spacing is just too much. Unless you're going to make every word/line clickable, there's no point in having that much space between lines.. Unless you're trying to make up for lack-of-content.

[Mike VandeVelde]

Re: Still no https? really wide margins

What do people think that HTTPS is going to hide? These are static pages!! The "metadata" is still out there, what do you think you get out of obscuring the content when all someone has to do is follow the link you followed to see what you saw? It's useful for something like Facebook where what you are looking at is customized to you and possibly private, but here would it not simply be a waste of processing power??

[Captain DaFt]

Re: Still no https? really wide margins

"What do people think that HTTPS is going to hide?"

How about your password?

Seriously, Http for login is really a bad idea these days!

[A Known Coward]

What's it supposed to look it?

Can we have some screenshots of what it's supposed to look like? I very much doubt it's exactly what I'm seeing, because that looks like something from over a decade ago, low res, sparse and hard on the eyes, but who knows?

What's immediately apparent is that there is no anti-aliasing on any of the text (was fine before). This is in Opera 26 (Chromium) on linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What's it supposed to look it?

@Known - Text looks perfect to me on Chrome 40.0.2214.28 beta-m. Browser issue?

[Bleu]

It would be really good if there was a flickering animated gif, at least flipping between the colour negatives, at the top of every page!

On a more serious note, I don't usually post in the fora, design is not suitable for reading from a small device.

Really think a flickering gif on every page would be fun for at least two or three months.

[Alanex]

Eh...

No thank you.

The ONLY good thing about the redesign is that you haven't gone for the annoying 'loading more...' trend to load more articles as you scroll down the page. I hate those kind of sites where you can't bookmark your current location and any reloading of the page requires you to scroll and load, scroll and load, scroll and load until you get back to where you were.

So well done for not doing that but in every other way the site is horrible now.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Eh...

It really says something when the only way to say something psoitive is to scratch around to find something that wasn't done that would have made it worse.

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile...

...how about if we could downvote each other's posts without reloading the whole page every time? Bit annoying, especially when I'm using my mobile allowance, generous as it is.

[Gene Cash]

Print article

Well, that was my way of not slogging through half a dozen "pages" at one or two paragraphs of content per page. It was pretty rough when 8 "pages" boiled down to half a properly formatted page.

For an example, look at the book & car reviews and the current cloud printing inkjets articles.

So I'll probably be cutting way back on my reading, as I just don't have the time & patience. I'll also be turning AdBlock back on.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Print article

I am not a fan of page spanning either - p.s. we still support print article .

[paul481]

Re: Print article

Then WHY have you removed the Print View button, and WHY did you post 1 hour earlier you are removing it. As I pointed out earlier, I also used to follow what was a very similar site called 'The Inquirer' (McGee ran it) but about 4 years back they completely cocked up the presentation, requiring readers to lose far more time to scan articles, so it became too annoying to visit anymore. Another site, think 'Pocket Lint' also made their site slower to find useful articles, so ditched that.

El Reg has always been one of my top 5 tech sites, so visit most days. I hope you too dont lose your tech credentials and go all marketing, as you'l lose an old reader. The site was ok as it was, little to criticise as evidenced by my first complaint on your presentation in 10+ years. I have a 5" smartphone, but stick to my 24" FHD Windows desktop for reading articles

[andy 28]

Re: Print article

'we still support print article'. You're suggesting that being able to print loads of pages of crap layout and adverts is comparable to a proper readable and printable view?

It was bad enough in the last redesign when the 'print' button at the top of the article got replaced by a twee icon somewhere down the left of the page. And now there's nothing. The only progress I can see is for advertisers, not readers. And without readers....

Some of us have a shit work network. Articles were readable by lining them up in printable view. The first might have finished loading by the time the last was queued up. But no more. It seems that I can spend ages scrolling around clicking next, next, next. Or move on. Not as if there's Lester to make us laugh, except for a few recipes.

[J.G.Harston]

Arrgggh!!!

Almost as bad as the Guardian's new website where half the content is dangling off the side of the screen and there's no horizontal scroll bars.

[Anonymous Coward]

AAAARGH!*

...the pandemic whitespace inflation has reached El Reg -- of no use to anyone but the tapfinger crowd, and wasting everyone else's screen estate.

Scrollwheel here I come :-((

* generated in parallel with, and independent from J.G.Harston's "Arrgggh!!! " !

[Zog_but_not_the_first]

Are clicked articles supposed to change from black to grey? A bit more contrast would be nice.

I've never been too keen on the "white space fetish" that has plagued design for ten years or more. Give me a Gutenberg Bible layout any day.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh Dear

I know you say that this is just a brush-up but it's not a good one and quite honestly if you've got a complete redesign coming next year then I can't see why this is warranted. What problem were you trying to solve and how is this a solution? (Sorry, don't mean that as harshly as it may have come out, but I don't call this "quick, modern, fresher").

It's just way too monochrome - as a result the eye can't easily separate one story on the front page from another. Don't like the font/capitals used for the menu. But I don't hit your front-page to be honest - come in through RSS feed - so the main gripe I have is that on a article page, with a screen height of 1050 I get to see just THREE lines of the article text!!! Fix that (by chopping the image down hugely) and it would still be an unwarranted change in my opinion but at least one I can live with.

[Spook]

Comments

Sometimes I know the story and just want to read the comments. You show the number of comments on the main page but it doesn't link directly to them, only the story.

[TMMITW]

Why bother?

Obviously different but in no way better. Don't make changes unless they offer a real improvement.

[Chris T Almighty]

Awful.

The excuse that you can't make it responsive because of advertising is really weak. If someone charged you for this redesign, you were had.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Awful.

It is not question of can't do - it's a question of won't do until we work our way through the business implications. We have 50 mouths to feed here.

P.S. Anything we do on this score in first instance would be adaptive not responsive.

[web_bod]

Re: Awful.

Screw it - you've given me a headache - you've still got your 50 mouths, but you've lost a pair of eyeballs - I used to click the ads.

I don't know why you had to dick around with the article layouts like this - I am not 12 - I come here to read some bile ringed tech news - not gawp at full screen images (ok they're not quite full screen, but on my laptop they are bloody close).

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks OK to me.

It's a lot brighter, but it feels a bit WALLOFTEXT.

Could you have alternating lines of (say) grey and white for the articles? So the first three articles have a white background, the next ones a grey background? Would that suck? It probably would but I don't know, that's why I do tech support and own a PC rather than doing graphic design and owning a Mac.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Looks OK to me.

There is a lot of headlines in the front page main grid - but more pics than previously - so not quite as much a wall of text than before

[Mark Jan]

If it Ain't Broke...!

You did something similar a few years ago and the reaction was similar - a huge outcry and you had to largely backtrack. The Reg v1 was the original and still the best.

You've now gone even worse than the changes you made then!

Please, please don't listen to the agency guys or go all web3. Just stick to what's made you successful in the first place - good info written up in a fun way in an easily readable format.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: If it Ain't Broke...!

I wasn't involved in last redesign - but I can say that there was little if any backtracking going on.

[CTM]

Re: If it Ain't Broke...!

You weren't involved in the last redesign but you can say there was little if any backtracking... Could you explain? At the moment it sounds that isn't possible...

[Synonymous Howard]

I'll stick with the mobile version everywhere thanks

mobile = less cluttered

mobile = less ads (see above)

[Chris G]

So the consensus is...

NNNNNOOOOOOOOO!

[Anonymous Coward]

Superb!

Much better match with our corporate colours and intranet, which means the Reg can be perused at length without passers by being any the wiser.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Superb!

Do you work for Coca-Cola? Or Pravda?

[Dr Trevor Marshall]

Where has all the content gone?

.

I DON"T OWN A FRIGGING iPAD or iPHONE

Why do you cripple a perfectly decent news site to pander to the likes of those who do?

.

I'm outa here....

[User McUser]

OPINIONS: I have some

1. Putting a banner ad *above* the masthead pushes everything down which combined with the large "featured story" graphic crowds the top of the page making it look like there is less content.

2. Having the three-column article list with the same background color as the main page body makes it look squeezed for some reason, like its narrower than it was before. Probably an optical illusion (or a lack of one.)

3. I liked Blue and Red for "alink" and "vlink" way better than Black and Grey.

Edit: 4. I agree with Michael Shelby's earlier comment about the nav bar on each article - you're blocking several lines of the article I'm trying to read with that thing!

Other than that, seems OK.

[trialanderr0r]

When I first saw the new landing page I seriously thought El Reg had forgotten to pay their domain name fees and the url had been squatted by a popup aggregator/printer seller...

Generic and banal....

The old site had its issues (indeed no option to "view as a single page")

[Anonymous Coward]

auto-detect mobile

I know there's a nice mobile site available, but the main .co.uk servers should automatically provide a mobile version of the site when viewed from a phone. Pinching and zooming around the main site on a phone shouldn't be required.

As far as the desktop site re-design...it's fine. Just let me phone automatically receive the mobile version.

[Sir Sham Cad]

Re: auto-detect mobile

Chrome on android 4.4.4 but every time I browse El Reg including this visit I get auto redirect to m.theregister.co.uk so not sure what's happening to everyone who is experiencing the opposite.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Re: auto-detect mobile

Did you every follow link to El Reg from twitter? I think there was a/b test on mobile auto redirect.

There is a change to the desktop link at bottom but that appears to have stopped working for some reason. Bug report.

[Bryn Evans]

Works For Me

Dare I say "I like it" ?

The text seems larger to my OLD eyes and the layout sits nicely in a 4:3 format TV?Monitor.

Question - I found myself already Logged In - Was that intended ???

[Bryn Evans]

Re: Works For Me

Just tried on my RiscPC (remember Acorn ?)

Still works ok, so well done for not breaking anything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Still works on RiscPC

Must admit that this did not loom large in our thinking. But I am happy it still works!

[Anonymous Coward]

And will we get...

...a background story in the "joss-sticks and whalesong" category?

I love stories from that category!

[Bad Beaver]

Gaaa, the whitness…

So much white … I second the impression that there is too much whitespace (like… everywhere), too much scrolling and it is BURNING MY RETINAE as I type this. Looks generic, cluttered and made for tablet use. I guess we'll live but it will take a while to adapt. The old design was not broken.

[Irongut]

Yuck

Ugh you've gone all Office 2013 / Win 8 with far too much unbroken WHITE and no shading / gradients / lines to separate the different sections of the page. My first thought was that the stylesheet had failed to download for some reason so I hit refresh before spotting the redesign story.

Could we please get an alternative theme with an off-white background or even an inverse theme with black background for those of us with a bit of Mogwai in our genes? The current one makes me want to put shades on.

[Philip Hands]

Ick

I didn't think much to the old thing with the changing content at the top of the screen that's just a repeat of the stories listed in a sane order below, but at least it was easy to ignore.

This is much less easy to ignore -- although I guess I'll manage it by not bothering to look at the site.

I'll check back in the new year to see if you've regained your sanity.

[ZSn]

sod the refresh why no https?

Not sure why you went for a 'refresh' how about an https site? You do bang on about security quite a bit you know - go on, make it a bit more difficult for NSA.

[Vulch]

Fixed bars bad

Dump the fixed menu bar or if you won't get rid of it at least give it a permanent hide setting. The only thing it does is make you lose a line or two when you page down and breaks the reading flow as you jog back and forth.

[Anonymous Coward]

OH FUCKIN DEAR, ANOTHER MIDLIFE CRISIS!!!???!!!???

CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGR IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK, CHANGE IT BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Also, no new ICONS.......where's my football ICON? Change it fuckin back for fucks sake.

Were you bored? Is that it? fucking hell!!

[chivo243]

Re: OH FUCKIN DEAR, ANOTHER MIDLIFE CRISIS!!!???!!!???

Icons, yes, where's the tinfoil hat?

[Anonymous Coward]

pictures at the top

The pictures at the top aren't big enough. Can we have them bigger please

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this site now NSA approved?

Cause they've fucked everything else up too.

[A Long Fellow]

Not good in either usability or readability

Love el reg, having been with the site almost from the very beginning. That said, I'm not too keen on the design; the more I live in it, the more I dislike it.

I was okay with the "five featured stories" at the top of the main column -- the single headline story is going to be a hit-and-miss proposition, now. With five stories, there was a better chance that at least one would be interesting.

In general, it feels as though the information density has dropped a lot.

I also dislike the black > grey link status. The grey-on-white combination fails 3 out of 4 accessibility standards. This is important: the design is hostile to users with non-optimal eyesight.

And finally, I take issue with the 'live popup' sections at the top of the screen -- particularly since they're pinned to the top of the window. This means that going up to any of the browser application menus or the browser window's buttons will probably -- unless I'm very quick about it -- cause irritating visual interference with what's on the screen. Putting that kind of thing left or right would be better, since it would not interfere with browser activity.

All in all, it's quite off-putting. Sorry.

[Adrian Taylor]

Too Many IMages

too many images, once you go above a certain number the eye will cease reading all the headlines and its difficult to know you have seen averything

annoying pop down menu

i dont see any reason for top stories or most read section

i like simple, scroll down in date order

you have made the site less more like any other media/tech site...

i used the old register design to show friends that you dont need all the garbage to make a decent useful web site... ho hum...

and information density is much poorer !

[Trevor_Pott]

Things I like about the new design:

1) Articles have pictures on them. Yay! Pictures add a lot to the experience, I think.

2) New masthead: the awesome motto of awesomeness is now nestled under "The Register." Biting the hand that feeds IT, forever!

3) Social Media buttons are more visible on article pages, make more sense, aren't blocked by my anti-spam stuff. Works out well, looks very nice.

4) I like the new footer. All the info you want, but not crammed so close together the links feel claustrophobic. Much nicer.

5) Articles on the front page have little counters for comments. It's cute. Shows the community engagement.

Things I don't like about the new design:

1) Articles have pictures on them. Boo! This means I have to pay a lot more attention when choosing my article images. Work, work...

2) Author info, posting time and social media buttons are below article picture. It seems counter intuitive. I keep looking for them above the picture.

3) The whitey whiteness of whitening. My kingdom for a black theme.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pictures get in the way

I have to scroll down before reading even the first line of story, because a (mostly useless, generally stock) image is in the way. Do you want me ask if it is worth the trouble?

[Anonymous Coward]

First reaction..

... was that the site had been hijacked in some way, but it appears that it wasn't but is meant to look as if it is.

On a large screen 1920x1200 it is horrible, too much white round everything. Not enough contrast to show what articles have been read awn what haven't.

This might work on a smart phone when you have people stabbing at it with thick fingers, it does not work on desktop or laptop screens.

A rethink is necessary on the part of the designer because only a little change was possibly needed from what was existent.

[marky_boi]

WTF !!!

fixing for fixings sake , site is crap Where is the auto scale good. I think my cat could do a better job.... hang on i hva no cat !!! seriously i will ditch the site if this steaming stays on....

[Orange Skydiver]

comments

Getting rid of the left hand column - ok.

Adding the picture at the top of the story - waste of time - get rid.

The bar that hovers at the top of the page when you scroll - hate these on every website that does them - get rid.

Visited link colour - needs higher contrast, it's not as obvious what you've looked at.

Generally de-cluttered - ok.

Personally I wish you'd put a fraction of this effort into proofing your articles. Not a day goes by when I don't notice typos and mistakes in the copy. This is a real problem. There were no real problems with the old layout.

[trance gemini]

i warned you

... that all that phonefondling and slabslapping would make your eyes go bad

just put a light grey background on the article boxes and that should take the edge off the whiteout effect

or how about start flogging Reg sunglasses in your shop?

[Uffish]

No complaints

I use an old, underpowerd 32 bit laptop and No Script and it still displays correctly (ie I can read it easily) .

Must admit that my primary concern was that the Registerwriting style had not been affected - quick look at the headline and all the eyecatching smutty inuendo is still there so all is ok.

Even with NoScript off everything seems to work quickly and clearly - well done.

[Benjamin 4]

I don't think there's any part of this that I think is an improvement.

Everything is too big, with too much white empty space so its hard to differentiate between stuff on the homepage. The always on top title bar means that using page down to scroll chops off a line of text.

I miss the carousel on the homepage, it was helpful to easily find some of the more interesting stories, as were the links at the bottom of artucles.

Why do companies repeatedly feel that they need to change something that works as it is? I don't want a 'more modern and fresh experience'. Pretty soon we'll just get blank screens with nothing on them because it's too difficult to use otherwise. Come on, give your readership some credit, we're not complete idiots.

I regularly read, but don't normally comment, however I feel I have to make an exception here.

[Greg J Preece]

I just came here to watch people nerd rage over a fairly minor update. Looks fine, though not adding responsive in any redesign these days is deserving of a whippin'.

Now, back to whiner watching.

[Adrian Taylor]

if you had asked

if asked about it i think many readers (yes readers) would have told you that the lack of annoying click bait pictures is one of the main attractions of the register

what's wrong with reading stuff ? We're not as stupid as you think we are !

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: if you had asked

> We're not as stupid as you think we are !

Speak for yourself. :-)

[Camilla Smythe]

Did Murdock... Icon --->

Spring the GeoCities wing from the Asylum during his latest escape?

[Bloodbeastterror]

What exactly was wrong with the old one?

End of message.

[John LS]

Me no likee

Top article way too big and white everywhere stop now please

[Chad H.]

Oh Gawd. Change it back, now, this is horrible.

Why on earth did El Reg get the Windows 8 Designer to redevelop the site? It was fine as it was.

[Mike48US]

Nope, I don't like it. Pretty pictures are nice but I come here for the articles. Will I learn to live with it? Probably, as this isn't my first redesign experience. But like the saying goes"You're getting it for nothing.. quit your bitchin".

It just seems too busy, and I generally like to click on things in order to have them respond. The automatic nonsense just irritates me.

[Anonymous Coward]

YOU SHOULD HAVE EASED US INTO THIS CHANGE WITH MORE FINESSE.

Not slap us in the face with it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'VE HAD TO TURN THE BRIGHTNESS DOWN ON ME MONITOR.

FUCK YOU VERY MUCH!

[Ben Boyle]

Might just be me but on my 1680*1050 screen the logo in the banner is looking a little jaggy.

Won;t stop me reading but I'm in the "Ewwwwwwwwwwww!" camp too. I like the overall layout of the articles on the main page but for me there's too much bright white space and it feels almost... unfinished?

And those popup/flyout leaders when you hover over the subnav are crazy annoying :/

[Tempest8008]

BOFH yourselves...

Honestly, "modern and fresher"?

AND you're going to have a consultant firm in to give you advice on further changes?

In both of these cases the BOFH would have to have multiple situations where inconvenient falls clear the way for common sense. And there's always the server room halon system...

Add another vote to the "Don't like it" column. I find it harder to read, and you're forcing me to relearn a bloody website.

I found The Register easy to navigate, clean and simple before. It got me to the MEAT of the site, which were the articles. Now I'm having to work harder to get to the information I want.

There's style and then there's simple function.

I'd prefer El Reg to be about the latter.

[Terrence Bayrock]

Re: BOFH yourselves...

Here here......

[David1]

Effing awful!

It's terrible. Please revert to the old design while you do a rethink.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some Constructive Suggestions

1 - Put section headers on Top Stories, Most Read, and Spotlight.

2 - Cut the Spotlight picture in half and move the text to the right of it to show more per screen.

3 - The Top Stories header (at top right) should link to the Top 20 Stories.

4 - Add Week's Headlines to top navigation bar (change items to initial caps if need to reduce space).

5 - Aesthetically it's really black and white. I'd consider blue for bolded text that is now black.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you

For leaving "this week's stories" alone since that allows me to do what I really want, which is to quickly peruse stories that are new since my last visit to see which ones I'm interested in reading.

[Alister]

Sorry, I'm not a fan. The large picture and headline of the featured stories take up too much room, the top menu is annoying when you move your mouse anywhere near it.

Also, the pagination on the comments seems to carry over two or three stories to the next page.

[Salts]

Err...

Is it April 1st?

[ma1010]

Fairly horrid

As has been pointed out by others, it wasn't broke, so why "fix" it? The old site gave me a quick way to look around and see which articles looked interesting to me. I never felt the previous layout was "cluttered," but the extra-big pictures on the new version *do* look cluttered to me. I would vote to go back to the way it was before. It just worked better.

[Return To Sender]

No. No, doesn't do it for me

First up, it would have been nice if you'd posted an article at the same time as pushing out the change so I didn't waste 20 minutes trying to work out what I'd done to my browsers

Second; there's a huge amount of wasted space on my main screen. Either make the page aware of what it's rendering on and use the space accordingly, or don't bother. And please don't make the header pic a third of the screen, it's pointless and irritating. I read the articles for the information, it's not a picture book fer chrissakes.

Third; not opening the article in a new tab? That's so basic I can't believe it's a deliberate design choice rather than a cockup, kindly fix it forthwith (edit: ah, it changes from black to a dark grey. Didn't spot that on the screen set the way it was. Grey. Really? C'mon...)

Fourth; what have you done with the 'visited' CSS so's I can see which articles I've already read? I use that sometimes as a fast-scan when looking for an article, not to avoid the article.

Fifth; article spacing on the main page; too much. I'm spending far more time scrolling up and down than before, it's a pain. And if you've got to have pics for the article, leave 'em in the rotating banner, or on a mouseover or something, don't throw another another possible row of article headers away just to look exciting and funky (or whatever).

That's from five minute's worth of browsing, so first impressions. But I'm concerned that as it stands it's not going to grow on me. The value of El Reg to me is the content, not the presentation so much. By all means make changes, but please don't lose sight of what people come here for. We enjoy the tabloid humour, since by and large it's not accompanied by tabloid-level journalism; let's not have the tabloid presentation style suited to limited attention spans for people who struggle to reach the end of a sentence, let alone a whole article.

[Johndoe888]

As an Admin of a popular site I know we have a makeover in the pipeline because the sysop / coder has put a poll on site about it and we have been shown a preview (black), YUCK, another black site :(

Fortunately our coder is currently far too busy with other work to finish the job :)

The best that I can say about the new look Reg is at least we escaped web 2.0 (lots of flash and other stuff that is heavy on the clients browsers), and thank F*** it's not all TIFCAM !

I want the old style back, why not have a preferences option as to which version of the the site we see and let us choose ?

Edit, upon clicking Submit, the top of the page showed ~

"Grey (mostly)&nbsp; axed from colour palette &nbsp;-&nbsp; site is probably too monochrome now - but where better place to start than black and white? Top ad moved&nbsp;&nbsp;-&nbsp;"

Is this &nbsp a bug or a &nbsp &nbsp glitch ?

[EndianX]

Not your finest moment

1. The enormous image at the top of the stories is too much. I want to see the words. I'm not so dim I need a large picture of Putin / Soldiers / A Printer in order to appreciate what a story is about. Between the header, the large text and the image I can't see *ANY OF THE BLOODY STORY*

2. Blank and white, and black and white, and black and white. Too monochrome

3. I don't need enormous text to tell me which stories I should read. I can choose that for myself.

4. That bloody menu bar....

5. The 'more stories' bit at the bottom looks just like the 'more from around the web' crap you see on many sites these days so (a) it instantly aggravates me and (b) it looks awful.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not your finest moment

The more stories unit has been there for a long time. We have simply removed other related stories unit.

[Zog_but_not_the_first]

And more..

I don't like the drop down ribbon at the top of the page. More hindrance than help.

Overall, a few niggles that I dislike, but importantly nothing that makes me say, "Gosh! That's a lot better". Sorry.

Suggestions: https please, and a few more icons.

[Anonymous Coward]

The new style is okay BUT:

- I'll agree with the others regarding constraining yourselves to the centre of the screen. A lot of wasted space at each side.

- The new aspect ratio used for displaying images makes me feel I'm peering through the slot of a letterbox. A bit more height is called for, right now there isn't sufficient area to show a full face without chopping bits off or making it a flea circus.

Browser here: Firefox 33 (self-built) on Gentoo Linux/AMD64. Resolution: 1366×768

[Adrian Taylor]

and the in text links are too blue and off putting

and the in text links are too blue and off putting

[Chris Gray 1]

Confusing colours

Sorry, I've only read the first page of responses, so this might be a duplicate. I run with JavaScript disabled nearly everywhere, so on the home page, a have-read article's headline is in red and so is a headline the mouse moves over. I would actually prefer that moving the mouse over something *not* change that something at all, but can you at least make the move-mouse-over be less jarring, or at least some other colour?

[Julian Bradfield]

Tend to agree with most of the above. The immediately obvious thing is that it takes up more space for less content, and yet it's harder to distinguish one block from the next. Fixed sidebars are wasteful. Fixed width is always wrong.

[aBloke FromEarth]

Yes

Lovely and clean! The layout's really improved.

Added bonus: not a hint of joss sticks or whale song.

[E Haines]

Top nav bar a bit broken

I use the minimum font size feature in Safari which prevents sites from obnoxiously displaying 3 pt type, and this apparently causes the nav bar to make the "Weekend edition" bit hang down permanently on the next line, covering up anything that might be there. Same thing in Firefox. You'd want to fix it so it doesn't break if the user changes font sizes. Also get rid of the ALL CAPS...nobody likes that. Nobody, ever. (And yes the popup thingy is quite annoying too.)

[DJV]

No...

JUST

NN.....................NN.........OOOOOOOO........**

NNN..................NN.......OOOOOOOOOO.....***

NNNN...............NN......OO..................OO.....***

NN.NN..............NN.....OO....................OO....***

NN....NN...........NN.....OO....................OO....***

NN.....NN..........NN.....OO....................OO....***

NN......NN.........NN.....OO....................OO....***

NN.......NN........NN.....OO....................OO....***

NN........NN.......NN.....OO....................OO....***

NN.........NN......NN.....OO....................OO....***

NN..........NN.....NN.....OO....................OO....***

NN...........NN....NN.....OO....................OO....***

NN..............NN.NN.....OO....................OO......

NN...............NNNN......OO..................OO.......

NN.................NNN.......OOOOOOOOOO......***

NN...................NN..........OOOOOOOO.........***

[Mage]

Terrible

I feel like I'm using 640 x 480 screen instead of 1600 x 1200

Bring back the old site.

It's like a design for TV?

[Don Coglioni]

nav bar flash: annoying

Hi there, is it just me wiggling my mouse around too much, or the top nav bar flash when you pass over it for some reason (... move mouse from some link in the page to a new browser tab, springs to mind ) , and it dutifully fires a very brief hover event, is quite annoying ?

Plus, I add myself to the Get Back Fluid Widths camp.

Oh, and on the frontpage, I find it a bit hard to understand where a news "box" (actually div class="headline") ends and the next (laterally and vertically) starts. Also, I see in the markup you've got a data-epoch attribute in the timestamp span. I might be mistaken, but that's not much of a date microformat ...

Also on the fronpage : 650x431 pixels for the large story box is a bit too much. Perfect for Page3 boobs, but not for the Register, I think.

my 2 x 10^-2 euros

[Wade Burchette]

In the words of Homer Simpson to Ned Flanders

"You suck-didly-uck new Reg!"

[Morten Bjoernsvik]

Still not looking good on mobile

On mobile I've always hated using ElReg. Now it is certainly better, But I still need to zoom in. On Mobile devices You need larger fonts,links and one collumn view.

[Captain DaFt]

http://youtu.be/cDGlN6mluGA

That is all.

[Mage]

Madness

main images MADLY too big. If I zoom out to make image correct size the text is greeked.

Browser unfortunately can Zoom out on everything or on text only. But can't reduce image size and leave text alone.

This is HORRIBLE. I don't want a kiddies Picture book. I want TEXT!!

Idiots.

I come here to READ! Not gaze at photos or Gifs.

[John Brown (no body)]

My comments.

Headline too big.

Story picture waaaaay too big.

El Reg banner logo looks very 1990's, mostly just blank red space.

Overall look of the site is too bland.

Roll-over menu bar is a real pain in the backside. (I tend to middle click the stories I'm interested in to open a load of new tabs then read - moving up to the tabs "flashes" am irritatingly huge pop-up at me)

Too much "stuff" all the way from the top border down a screen and a half before I get to the article.

Getting back to the banner, why not move the actual logo to the left of the "red top" then put the "Hello user | sign out", the "Cash'n'Carrion Whitepapers The Channel" and maybe even the search box inside the "red top".

Next, make the story image 100% relevant and a suitable size, ie in the story "No more free Windows... and now it’s all about the services", crop out the huge blue area at the bottom of the image and get rid of the image for "FreeBSD developers VANQUISH Demon bug" altogether. It's a tech web site with tech aware readers. We don't need a picture of a fly on a keyboard to let us know what is meant by "bug".

If there's no press release or picture of the person/thing the story is about, then don't bother with an image at all. A huge Goggle logo pasted over a skull doesn't add to the headline. Surely you've sat through depressingly graphic powerpoint presentations and had a moan about over use of graphics, images etc? I know there's regular comments from your readers about that very subject. Please don't do it on the site.

I would suggest scaling the story image to be no more than half the article width and putting it inside the text, top left and flow the text around it if you really must have pictures. Oh, and if you want to get any awards for accessablie content, put something useful in the alt tags.

Someone wise once said a picture is worth a thousand words. A quick review of the latest 10 or stories tells me you've managed to fit a thousand words into one in most cases. And the Word is "meh!"

[Dan 55]

Those images are big aren't they?

I'd like to say more but I still haven't managed to scroll down to the text yet... It must be even better for those with a bog-standard 16:9 laptop.

[ad47uk]

copying others

It seems like the type of design you have gone for is the norm these days, digital spy is almost the same, our local paper site is about the same. i think web designers seems to come out of the same mould these days. I hate these stupid menus at the top that seems to be on almost every site now.

[GBE]

Didn't notice the change.

I honestly didn't notice any difference until I read the article about it.

I do now see that the layout of the comments page is broken rather badly (at least in my copy of Firefox). There's a tall column of coments with several inches of whitespace on each side. Below that, there's the login/logout stuff shoved up agains the right hand edge of the window. Then below that there's a column of ads a few inches wide and a couple feet tall with 10-12 inches of whitespace on the left. Then the footer way, way down there below all that.

Fail.

I honestly don't understand why peple think web sites have to be redesigned every year or two simply for the sake of change. Is the web designer union that strong? Web sites don't ever seem to get any better -- just different.

I assume the real purpose is to intentionally move everything around so that people can't find anything. That way they have to waste time stumblling past more crap and more ads before they find what they actually came for.

I'm pretty sure large brick and morter retailers swear by that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Comments layout broken?

We have not touched the comments layout - so am not sure what is going on here. If you have time, please send us screenshot, browser version, OS to [e-mail]

Thanks.

[CmdrX3]

I'm no design expert but...

To be honest, I'm not loving it. Maybe it's just because it's different and I'll get used to it, but I just seem to be scrolling forever to get through all the articles. I know you've tried to declutter things, but for me the FP looks even more cluttered than it did before, but like I said I'm no design expert. Pictures though is good, I like pictures.

[Jim Willsher]

Bloody hell! On a 24" screen at 1920x1080, the headline picture is insanely big! I thought those sheep were in my living room FFS!

[Jamie Jones]

"thought those sheep were in my living room FFS!"

Yes, as a Welshman, I have to conceed that that part of the site design was welcome

[Candy]

Images too big.

It's difficult to really assess the redesign when there's a fundamental flaw for me. I have to scroll down a whole page to see any text in any article. The images are massive. Thumbnails, please. Really. Please?

[Red Bren]

My tuppence worth

I read El Reg for entertainment and enlightenment, so I'm prepared to put up with advertising so that the staff can eat. Sometimes the ads have even worked! However, top banner and sidebar advertising selling the same thing? I don't need to see it twice, I'm not going to think "I wasn't sure about that product when I saw the banner ad, but now I've seen the portrait ad, I'll buy five!". Can you drop the Top banner ad, so we can see some more headlines? You can show me more ads once you've drawn me in!

The Top Stories are in the wrong place and take up far too much room with the large picture - you could fit a thousand words in that space! What I want to see when I open El Reg are the Latest Stories at the top of the page, without having to scroll down for them.

There's too much repetition on the page. Is there that much difference between Top Stories, Most Read and Spotlight? Just keep Most Read but with the format of Spotlight

Finally. For the love of all that is holy, can you switch off the Expanding Nav Bar? Or at least put a delay on it so the menu only pops up if I hover over it? I don't want it jumping up at me every time my mouse goes near it, especially if it covers over the very thing I want to click on, so I have to move the pointer down past the unwanted pop-up, then back up again once it disappears.

[Red Bren]

Re: My tuppence worth

It looks nice on my mobile though...

[Roo]

This will be lost in the tide... But here goes...

Reg, that reformatting effort was very, very brave.

[James 29]

Please turn it back

The new layout looks very white and dated

This is not modern or fresh

The text and pictures are very large, even on 1080p screens. The site does seem designed for tablets rather than anything else.

Please bring back the old layout

[Jamie Jones]

Re: Please turn it back

I use. Tablet most of the time, and to me, any site 'designed for mobile/tablet' is crap.

Remember that thing called HTML, that could flow and adjust itself to any device size?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tabloid to tabletoid?

It all looks very iPad and designed more for thumbs than mice.

Major dislike.. How (if possible) can I disable the expanding nav bar / mouseover behaviour using Firefox? I like simple menu bars I can click on, not ones that eat 1/3rd of the browser display every time the mouse gets close. I'm guessing this behaviour is to suit touch screens.

What's wrong with red to show stories I've read? The black/grey scheme is much less obvious.

[Anthony Hegedus]

I thought you'd been hacked

[Frederic Bloggs]

"improving comments"

Clearly I am on some moderation list, but if you want me to "improve my comment", then how do I do that now? There is no link, nor is there an edit box any more.

[Gert Leboski]

Severe but practical.

I'm not all that struck on the top nav menu and all that blurts over the page from it, but to be honest, I think I quite like the new layout. It feels quite natural to use for me. I only ever use it on desktop and iPad, which I haven't tried it on as yet, but I will do. I'm not sure how that menu will feel on a tablet. hmm

To be fair though, I have rarely forayed into the nav menu in all the years that I have been reading here. I usually just skim the main page for articles of interest, poke around the comments and I'm off again. Sadly that's a few times each day, on average. So really, for me, it's the main content area of the page that gets my attention, nothing much around the edges. Apart from being really "appealed to" by the always relevant advertising on this site. ;) In fact, it's the only site throughout the entire web that actively makes me just spunk money galore as a direct result of advertising. *

* Just doing my bit to help. Feel free to use it as a testimonial of sorts when talking with your advertising peeps. :-D

[Will Godfrey]

Why?

Just... Why?

[Haro]

I love it!

Had to put this in here, just to be different. Really, I'm colour-blind and I don't care. Just give me the articles.

[Rick Leeming]

urgh

When will people work out we don't all use a tablet or phone all the time?

Mobile theme yes, but can we have a real website for real use?

this is horrible on my desktop, and mouseover menus are a travesty best left in 1998.

[John Brown (no body)]

Just spotted another "gotcha"

In us_navy_deploys_poncey_laser_cannon, we get a huge image to "highlight" the story, then two lines of text then the same huge image again.

PLEASE DON'T DO THAT. I'll assume for today that it's teething troubles, but did no one actually look at that page before clicking on "publish"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Just spotted another "gotcha"

Thanks for the catch - teething production issue here. Think this will fade away.

[The Dude]

thought me browser wss hijacked and opened the wrong site....

first impression: far too busy. Looks like a bog standard lamestream media site. I might grow more comfortable with it, but really I liked the old layout.

[Scaase]

NO!

Just... no!

From the glaringly over bright page with text bordering on the ridiculously large, to articles that - unless I have my browser at near enough full-screen height - I have to scroll down just to START reading because of a massive, unnecessary image on each page? No no no no no !

Sorry, but I find this redesign supermegafugly

[Leo Edwardsson]

Flagrant design error. Register over. Rubbish = very yes

There aren't enough swear words in all the human languages that have ever been spoken to express how much I dislike this. Not even if you count the try-hard phonies like Esperanto and Klingon. I'm Australian, so when I find myself struggling to muster sufficient profanity, the aggravation has exceeded all bounds of natural law and common decency. Change it back forthwith, or by all that's Chromey I'll remove you from my list of homepage tabs.

[Anonymous Coward]

What about being a responsive site?

Everything listed in what you have changed is not revolutionary, and certainly not made the site more modern, just more like it should have been 5 years ago already.

[Anonymous Coward]

THIS IS YOUR WINDOWS 8 EL REG!!!!!

GO BACK TO THE XP VERSION YOU TWATS!!!!!

[malleeMan]

The uncategorised retro style was perfect - I felt in control of the content

So El Reg goes all modern and now looks like every other news site. Hire an agency and it will get even worse.

Every time a designer gets between a reader and content, something gets lost. We start seeing things with a designers perspective . . . and what do they know. They know white space, dotted rules and superfluous information - that's what they know. Your old style just presented stories, not content pre-digested by those good with coloured pencils.

It's a shame really. El Reg was an eccentric site with an effective, easy to use retro interface. Now the designers union has homogenised it.

[haaz]

A new design! Just what I was thinking.

Indeed, just yesterday, I thought, "Hey, I've been reading El Reg for years... haven't they changed it 't all? Mm, they could use a little touch here and there. Ah well. Good stuff, I'll keep mindless devouring.

Still not sure what I think, but yeah. Not offended or nothing so far.

[Guy 2]

Oh boy

I'd just upgraded Firefox and thought it was that, then up came the article about the redesign. Using either firefox or ie I've got about 50% of my screen completely white, either side of the screen, not pretty. The top third of the screen is taken up by a humoungous picture with the caption running opaquely through the bottom of the picture. I've a mate that's a printer, if he sees this in print he ends up rolling on the floor in tears at the ineptitude/inexperience of the layout designer, because it makes the text hard to read. I have to concur and think this is equally applicable to web design.

The white at the edge of the screen is like having two bright lights on either side of the screen, not very pleasant.

I've also only got one and a half row of articles at the bottom of the screen.

Was your UA testing internal, because you need more people commenting on it before you send something like this live, banks, big business (I've consulted at both) have big UA Testing teams.

Right end of comments because even the comments screen is hard to use. I do hope you can switch back quickly because this is plain 'orrible.

[Ben Tasker]

Re: Oh boy

Holy crap, there's an article about the makeover? Hadn't even got that far down the front page before I headed for the forums to bitch about the new layout.

The homepage is unreadable for me, I spend a good proportion of my day looking at console's (black background, white text), such an extreme wash of white is really fecking uncomfortable.

If it hangs about, I'm going to have to get my news and my kicks elsewhere because I don't think I'll be able to read more than one article before I get a headache, certainly won't be able to keep my OCD happy by reading 'n' pages of comments afterwards.

[Ben Tasker]

Re: Oh boy

And now I realise I've commented on the article.... came in through the forums :)

One other observation - might just be me, but the image on this story - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/11/ripa_legislative_overhaul_experts/ looks like it's been overstretched to fit the space, which makes it even less useful than it was before.

[Matt Brigden]

my eyes you idiots my eyes

Too bright you fools too bright . Do you not realise we spend more hours than you in front of screens regardless of if we are working or merely pretending too . Too much white = bad . Tone it down . I am not saying beige lord help us but not so much of the I'm going to rip out your retinas white .

[Anonymous Coward]

BUG REPORT.......

....ITS SHIT!!!

[Kev99]

Redesign

Phhhbbbttt!!!

[Sureo]

I hate hot links that pop up all over the screen when you move your mouse around. If I want to see one I can click on it.

[Anonymous Coward]

LOOK.....ITS NOT TO LATE, JUST ROLL IT BACK LIKE A BAD UPDATE

I'm a poet and i didn't know it :()

[Jove]

Very stark; almost utilitarian.

[Randolf McKinley]

Skype?

They buggered up Skype a while back, too sparse, too much white space, now El Reg has followed suit. Good one. Not.

And why are the fonts so bloody big?

[eddystone82]

Can we have a switch please?

Can we have a classic style switch please? This is bad. Not as bad as the new Guardian layout but why do we have to have everything spread out so much on these redesigns, as other people have said, really tiring for the eyes.

[Ben Tasker]

Re: Can we have a switch please?

I second that request.

Looks fecking awful on my monitor, and I used to use the 'Most Commented'.

The front page feels like it's shouting at me, font's just too big and there seems to be a lot of space wasted.

The menus are bloody annoying too, every time I bring my mouse down from the address bar the things trigger

[Atomic Duetto]

I'm on an iPad and it looks crap... Far too much white space, huge fonts and shit layout. Fer instance, I have to scroll when hitting the comments page just to see the first comment.

Could I have a link to the old site please

Can I have the most commented list back too.. Or are you afraid people won't read all the 'articles'.

It really is shit.

[as2003]

Moving deckchairs

Ignore these luddites; the reg has been due a makeover for a very long time.

I applaud the move in the right direction, but you still have a long way to go.

You may have moved a few deckchairs around, and administered a lick of paint here and there, but you have some serious flaws in functionality. The most obvious of which is the inability to get any notification that your comment has received a response. With user engagement comes page-views. You're pissing free money up the wall.

And for the love of god please hire a professional graphic designer.

[Gomez Adams]

Links no longer marked as read / red?

So how am I supposed to keep track of which articles I have already looked at?

[chuckufarley]

Meh...

I can still read the news and that is good. It still uses a fix width format that is a waste of screen space on any modern monitor, which is bad. So as I said above, meh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the redesign going to get rid of...

…all the right-wing bullshit that's infected the site over the past few years?

Or is the plan to still troll readers rather than sticking to what they claim to know about?

[Anonymous Custard]

Re: Is the redesign going to get rid of...

No it's just going to get rid of a fair chunk of the readership. Or at least blind them with dazzling white.

I'm sure the advertisers will just love that...

[Neoc]

My 2c

Mostly OK - default font's a bit large but I could live with it.

Two things I'd like to see disappear:

1) The auto-expanding menu. Please return it to click-to-expand. Every time I move my mouse to the browser's menu then back down to the page it causes one of El Reg's menu items to automatically expand. Very annoying.

2) Default colour for visited links/articles has changed from red to grey. And a grey which (on my screen at least) is difficult to differentiate with the normal link/article titles unless I pay attention. I hated it in the "more stories" section of the old site, an I really loathe it on the main page. Please change the default "visited" colour to something easy to identify.

[Dwarf]

Ulgy and un-readable

It used to be easy to come here and get info. Now I get VERY LARGE FONTS and the information content is lower.

Use smaller fonts.

Use ALL the width of my browser window.

Dump the pointless graphics at the top of the page or I can't read this in the office any more and it will take longer to load on the train.

Loose the slow loading adverts for the same reason.

Did you know that modern graphics cards can display loads of different colours all at the same time, we're not in the 70's any more.

Seriously. Drop the change for change's sake. Go back to what worked fairly well (bar the slow loading adverts)

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate it - sorry

1. I opened El Reg and nearly went blind. The site is so stark now that when you open it in a dark room with only monitor and TV screen for illumination this site now is like a LED torch!

2. Harder to navigate - it used to be that stories were laid out in order of age, so:

1 2 3

4 5 6

=bar=

7 8 9

etc

Now it lookes like it goes something like

11111? 2?

11111? 3?

4? 5? 6? 7?

The ? because I haven't actually figured it out yet as the story in position 1 is one I read earlier before the redesign, so fairly sure it isn't newest story.

3. Fixed width menu bar - come on who thought of that? Seriously, slap them. It's not hard to make it resizable, trust me I've done it.

4. I hate to think what it looks like with adverts, suffice to say I'm not going to turn off adblock to find out.

I know everybody hates redesigns, but seriously this reminds me of the GMail redesigns where they made it worse in the interests of "making it better". I'm sure that eventually I'll get used to it, but I'd really rather not.

[paul481]

Why have you removed the Print view ?

I followed El Reg most days for well over 10 years; used to follow the once similar 'The Inquirer' until about 4 years back they had an awful makeover, slowing my access to news of interest, so I stopped visiting.

I like to archive articles of interest - but want to save just the article, not the irrelevance surrounding it, hence the need for Print View.

[Terrence Bayrock]

Why mess with it?

Yuck

Too much white space

make the text denser on the interline spaceing

top article overly massive (why?)

side-bar text box too large

skip the colourful drop-menus on the nav bar & just post links...

bring back the ever-loved shareware - software downloads page(s) :) !!

It's the content !!!!!!!!!!

[hEdly]

go back to the previous version

Not a fan. The old version was just nice and simple. It was easier to scroll through the headlines and pick the stories that I really wanted to read.

I don't like the big storie at the top center. Why is it there? Is it the newest story? No it isn't because I found it way down on the list. Is it the most popular? No because I would assume that would be over with the top stories. And why isn't the change in web format the top story for like the next week or more? Sheesh, this article was way down on the list.

Also, why are the "top stories" on the side. and how is a top story different than the "Most Read Stories" down below? One would think they would be the same.

Then what's with that article kind of in the middle of the page that breaks up the flow?

Why do some articles have images and other's don't? Also the images are too big, the thumbnails on the old page were smaller and didn't break things up so much --> better flow.

too many sites are all snazzy and dynamic and I try to avoid those. I want a simple interface to find the info I want to consume. If it's too busy with too many adds then I go elsewhere. Even though this version is relatively simple and clean, I just makes it more difficult to read. Did you all change fonts?

[JeffyPoooh]

Given that it's all database driven...

One could imagine a Universe where the users (readers) could select their favorite 'Shell'.

With a Click to Save Preference feature.

It's perfectly do-able.

[Snake]

A measureable improvement

The large variety of replies are from, well, computer techs, geeks and nerds with no experience in publishing.

Since I HAVE experience in publishing I will say: Thumbs up.

Fellow posters have no idea of "white space" in a publication, they think that a page should be a continuous sheet filled with words, data and images. They can't understand the concept that white space increases readability to the human eye and is necessary for increased comprehension. Your new format cleans up and increases column gutters, a very nice graphical change. The drop-down menu is dynamic and creates an instant level of interactive feedback, very modern and a good use of space. The single headlined image is a VAST, VAST improvement in layout dynamics - I can't stress that enough. Tremendous!

The system will need tweaks to come up to everyone's expectations but I say "Great job!" to the designers, writers, programmers, layout artists, editors and contributors all at The Reg.

[web_bod]

Re: A measureable improvement

But sweetie - this site is targeted at geeks and techies - it's great that you work in publishing - but this isn't a reflective bit of paper - it's a back-lit screen - so in this environment so much brilliant white with a narrow typeface is actually more effort to read and results in more eye train particularly when you look how closely spaced the characters are compared to the line and paragraph spacing.

[storax]

Re: A measureable improvement

"...particularly when you look how closely spaced the characters are compared to the line and paragraph spacing."

¡¡ YES !!

[Jim Hague]

Re: A measureable improvement

Bollocks on stilts. And a noted piece of snide about us stupid unfortunates who, er, comprise the Reg's readership.

My monitor is NOT a page of print. You're making me read while shining a bright white torch into my eyes either side of and behind the text. You think that's a good idea? That's making text easier to read? Really?

And that making me scroll the main page to see what's there? That's a good thing? I think you may have noticed that on Planet Geek we beg to differ. Please, please, esteemed El Reg - on my Apple Cinema 30" I can now see precisely three stories on the front page below the main image. That's incredibly wasteful of both my screen space and my time.

Frankly, I'd like the site to go back to the design before last and stop trying to dictate to me how wide I should have my browser window and refusing to make use of space that is available. Or, effectively, that I should resize the window each time I switch tabs.

[Daggerchild]

Re: A measureable improvement

"they think that a page should be a continuous sheet filled with words, data and images. They can't understand the concept that white space increases readability to the human eye and is necessary for increased comprehension"

Unless:

1) The audience read a lot of technical manuals, research papers, or other dense dataforms and now have a rapid visual ingest rate and are proficient at skim-scanning blocks of text.

2) They've used the same fonts on computers for so long they now have dedicated neurons that lock and grok them with unusually little effort.

3) They aren't using the assumed display device, and the design proportions are now completely thrown out and many eye movements are now required to read a sentence that previously fitted wholly in the retinal hotzone, and many physical+page movements and visual resettlings+rescans are required to accomplish what previously required one to none.

e.g. I can wave my eyes over a page of computer code in my favourite font and *subconsciously* notice a comma where there should be a fullstop.

e.g. medium.com use a huge unfamiliar font and *acres* of whitespace, when you aren't scrolling past an even larger image - my eyes have *immense* difficulty ingesting it. The articles are metres long. But I'm sure it would be *lovely* on a tablet with momentum scrolling.

[Terrence Bayrock]

Re: A measureable improvement

Perhaps in the hardcopy world would your comments have credibility.

Also, target your style for the audience; since the typical loyal el Reg reader is (in all probability) a techie, type fonts and other publishing nuances are lost. Content is king (or queen) ; leave the flashy stuff to the Hollywood tabloids or The Guardian.

On second thought, even The Guardian's website, busy as it is, (unfortunately) outclasses this attempt. I acknowledge that the Reg publishers/editors were maybe looking to improve the website, but IMHO, this change is regressive.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: A measureable improvement

There is the whole problem! You are a publisher.

You 'think' you know what the market wants, and spend NO time listening to the readers. You lot force crap changes on the readers with no knowledge of your core audience, and eventually piss them off so much they all fuck off. Then you are left with a loss making waste of a site thats gone from EXCELLENT IT opinion to doing piss poor book/car/TV/movie reviews.

Here is a nail, you might need it for that coffin...

[paultnl]

Re: A measureable improvement

You make the mistake of thinking that the publisher is more important than the reader.

[g00se]

Too much

Too much white, too much black. Way too stark. Who told you that grey is bad?

[Camilla Smythe]

I'll check back later --> Mine protects me from Pron

ITMT the rest of you might wish to visit..

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html

To view the future of El Reg.

[Kevin 6]

Re: I'll check back later --> Mine protects me from Pron

sadly almost find that layout better then the shit they put up here

[Destroy All Monsters]

Re: I'll check back later --> Mine protects me from Pron

Why would you want to be protected from Pron?

[wsm]

White on white

What bothers me most about redesigns is that they nearly always make a site less useful What is it that people think are proper design goals?

I have seen this trend toward white-out design in too many places, now it has struck here. And that big graphic? I prefer the one that I could scroll through if needed.

The whole site now looks overly bright (on the screen, not necessarily more clever) and less useful.

[pinkmouse]

The whole point of design is to steal a good idea and make it better.

Not steal something dreadful and make it worse.

[Anonymous Coward]

How very Yahoo!

Has El Reg been acquired by Yahoo! ? The makeover reminds me of Flickr - - which ignored all the screams of protest and desertions. From being almost addicted to browsing that site several times a day - it now gets visited about once every two months for about 10 seconds.

I can see El Reg going into the same "I wonder if they've regained their sanity yet" category - tomorrow.

[Shannon Jacobs]

Obviously driven by the ads to destroy your actual assets

You didn't mention the two most obvious changes I've noticed so far. You increased the visibility of the ads and made the overall effect more intrusive (and therefore less attractive) and you made the comments less accessible (and presumably more controllable AKA easier to censor).

What are your actual assets? I think you have two: Integrity and credibility. Rewording as questions, do you speak the truth, and do we believe you when you speak? Showing how much you worship the ads damages both of your actual assets. The probable result will be fewer eyeballs for you to sell, resulting in lower revenue, resulting in greater desperation, resulting in a death spiral. Nothing special there, looking at the state of Web-based journalism.

Hey, why don't you try a different business model? Here's a version of an ancient suggestion adapted to your situation: I call it #MDFC (More Democratic Funding Campaigns), but you might prefer to think of it as "better than Kickstarter". Essentially, you would EARN a commission by supporting constructive projects related to your stories.

For simplicity and because the Register isn't worth a lot of effort for customization, I'll use an example based on a problem. A hot one right now is Web neutrality, eh? After an article on the topic, you would offer 3 to 5 links to #MDFC projects to help SOLVE the problem. You would earn your commission (let's say 5%?) by supporting the project proposal and EVALUATION of how well it worked. You would make sure that each proposal is complete, including a feasible budget and schedule for ALL of the required resources. You would work to make sure (based on your increasing experience with prior proposals) that nothing crucial is omitted, like testing or the cost of a satisfaction survey. Most importantly, you would make sure the project has clear success criteria. If enough of the readers like the project and pledge money, then you would fund the project (and take your cut) and afterwards, you would evaluate it. (By the way, a project might be internal, such as additional research and another article on the problem.)

Where does the money come from? You can hold it by acting as the "charity share brokerage" and we would trust you to manage our "charity share brokerage accounts". After we pledged all of our donation to various projects, we could look back at our donation history, see how much good we had done by helping to fund those projects, and hopefully decide it's worth another donation.

Convince me you're interested and I'll reveal some of the viral funding aspects...

[Anonymous Coward]

Two real problems

Amongst all the complaining about change, there are IMO two very valid criticisms of the redesign:

1. The prominence given to massive graphics over the text content. Any fewl no that you shouldn't be pushing the content below the fold, and certainly not for the sake of a picture that's merely an illustrative adornment.

2. That bloody expanding navbar is distracting and hideous. How nobody spotted what a usability disaster that would be I really don't know.

You also should be using a more responsive design that doesn't thrust a tablet-friendly format at large screen PC users, but then I'm sure you know that.

[J.G.Harston]

Ok, it's more than four hours since I saw the old layout, so I can't remember what the hell it looked like, so I can't make any comparisons, but let's go into tester mode. here are some positive critisisms:

* get rid of the huge popup menu. whenever I move towards my browser's menu bar and have to traverse your menu bar half the screen disappears. did nobody ever teach you about unneccessary movements? a line of exactly the same height as the menu bar popping up would be ok, but not that huge thing.

* on the front page get rid of that huge picture and headline for the lead story. that ends up being the *entire* *visible* *content*. there was nothing wrong with the top three/four(*) stories across the top inch of the content panel. scroll down until "unwashed BBC 3" is just off the bottom of the screen. that's what the home page layout should look like, with "internet of sheep" being three picture+headline within a box enclosing the three of them

* get rid of the "unwashed BBC3" sub-box two-column thingy. it's just washing two "boxes" of space. make it just another one-box headline

* a few horizontal lines to break the stuff up, just before the next section that starts with three pictures - in fact, those three pictures+headlines is the layout of what should be in the "internet of sheep" box

* a vertical line between the lefthand content panel and the righthand related topics/etc panel. As each panel is often a different length it looks odd having the content with a random blank space next to it. look at how the forum is laid out, the content had a box outline so there's a visual break between it and the empty space under the righthand panel

* the picture leading an article is really too huge something like lefthand 2/3 headline, righthand 2/3 picture quarter the size of the current picture

* dammit, get rid of the popup menu! yes mentioned a second time because it's pissed me off so much mousing over it to attempt to get to my tab bar to refer to other pages while typing this.

so: ok as a beta test, don't release it into the wild, fix it up before making it live.

[Ketlan]

Let's have a poll

Obviously many readers hate the change while some seem to embrace it. How about a poll that will show precisely what the balance is? At least that way, the site editors can act in the best interests of the readers AND El Reg.

[John Tserkezis]

Here's something different: I don't entirely hate it.

I have some head issues that don't deal with distracting unrelated content on the side, but I can take those out.

To be constructive, the menu bar is a pain. Sure, if it's something that I'm going to use all the time to help navigate around the site - great - but it isn't, it's only taking up screen real estate. I'm quite happy to scroll to the top on the odd instance I want to use it. My laptop has only 600 pixels from top to bottom, so it occupies a large amount of screen space. 600 pixels man! I can get rid of that too, but the cost is I lose it completely - which I don't want to do.

Pictures. They're huge. They're fucking huge. Worse still, having top pictures in "most" of your stories doesn't help, they're unrelated, and fucking huge. It's like you took a leaf out of the annoying marketing manual and thought since a moderate image is good, a fucking huge and unrelated image MUST be better. I don't want to turn off all pictures, and in fact the Win7 version of the reg I had most that were related, were also visible to me. But now that they're not, I'm >< THAT close to wiping out images completely.

Social links. Really? Do you not read your own forums? You probably only have 18 readers that follow the networks to any degree, and all of them claim they DON'T use it for sharing cat photos. But they secretly do. Oh fine, leave them in, but I'll be scrubbing them out at this end anyway.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Turn Off the CSS

I tried that. The article is more readble but because of the element order, the article is about 25 feet down the page after everything else. :-(

[Steve Knox]

Most of it's fine

(after the stereotypical kneejerk "OMFG UI CHANGE" reaction)

But when you have ONE GIANT STORY at the top of the page, taking up almost all of the initial screen, you're alienating your major audience, who, let's face it, are return readers. We've either seen the top

stories already or we'll get to them.

Tone it down so they take up less than 1/3 of the home page.

[Daggerchild]

Oh poo. Tabletisation.

Well, I judge website redesigns with the following criteria:

Q: What proportion of the browserpane is the stuff I actually came to see?

A: On load, fullscreen 1280x1024, the amount of screen real estate *actually* relevant is ~30%

Q: How much/many of these are visible without scrolling?

A: 6 items. Maybe 7. Down from, what, 12? more?

Q: What proportion of the pane is the stuff the *site owner* wants me to see, but I don't?

A: ~40%, including the MAHOOSIVE image. So about 30% whitespace. Useful maybe on a tablet/phone. I'm not on a tablet/phone.

A full dedicated monitor screen now has less actual information on it than a phone?

Wait.. is a text browser now *more* useful than a graphical one?

*checks* - 12 articles in one page. No summaries, smashed into blocks by adverts and nav links. And none of the links work now. So, no I guess.

Ooh - m.theregister.co.uk works much better tho......

...

... Er.. I forgot how fast text browsers were.. erm... this is sickeningly fast.. and gives me lots of everything I want, instantly.... erm..

Well, er, yes, you have a very pretty imageful, spacey site now. Just promise me you won't go full retard like medium.com.

Meanwhile, tho, it seems I just found out you make a superior one :-/

[He's Dead Jim]

New York here.

I just logged on to read the rage comments, and I gotta say, I laughed so hard at certain posts that I almost passed out.

"lucky we didn't say anything about the dirty knife"

P.S. - just curious if the print version option is gone for good or not. I don't see the icon.

[Sl1ck]

Oh Dear,,,,,

Where to start?

- Too much white and white space.

- Too much scrolling.

- Too much white and white space.

- Pop up pics too large.

- Too much white and white space.

- Would prefer Reg bar to be @ the top of the screen, not the advert.

- Too much white and white space.

- Fixed width not my idea of fun.

- Too much white and white space.

- The Reg just became very hard work to read :-(

Other than that - very poor showing.

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF?!

Came into work this morning and proceeded with my usual "time to catch up on some morning news quickly just in case Adobe decided to release yet another Flash Player patch" and my first reaction upon loading The Reg was "uh what did the page not load properly *smacks Ctrl+F5*" to "oh god no..."

And boy am I glad I'm not the only one.

The old layout was absolutely perfect. Totally agree with the first couple of comments. If it ain't broke don't fix it... especially if the fix in question draws inspiration from Office 2013.

[Anonymous Coward]

Faint vertical line divider to the left of the Top Stories column ...

... speaking as a typesetter/designer in a long-ago previous life before moving into IT.

People's eyes will tend to wander all the way from left to right without a "stop" indicator and I think the top stories column is supposed to be read vertically.

Also, hardly any colour - black on bright-white - is a little harsh. Maybe go for a shade of blue at least in the headlines?

I seriously recommend having a look at the Guardian's website. You'll see what I mean about vertical dividers I think - and for a massively "busy" front page it's actually quite calm and easily navigable. Might give you a few tips.

[Grade%]

Ouch.

My eyes were slapped by a giant photo as I clicked in. On a positive note, I spotted the Cash'n'Carrion link. The menu bar that follows my scrolling must die. Please kill it. Thank you.

[oiseau]

What the f*ck were you all thinking?

I'll be quite frank, like many other readers have been:

You new design stinks to high heaven, litterally a POS.

Please take things back to where they were.

Please ...

CIV

PS: should also should take some measures with respect to those responsible. Drastic ones.

[hekla]

Problems with new site

1: Get rid of the exploding nav-bar.

2: Custom colours for read and unread stories. Browsers are designed to set these, so it is extra effort and COST to set them as well as a source for errors in coding.

[BrowserUk]

You forced my hand; and this is the result.

This is what you send me: http://imgbin.org/images/21306.jpg

And this is what I now see: http://imgbin.org/images/21307.jpg

No teasers; no hot; no large story; no static; no dont miss; no right col; no spotlight; no sponlinks; no crumtrail; no story grid;

S'not perfect yet. I haven't found a way to fill my screen yet; but at least what I do see is stuff I want to see.

Oh. And, because you forced my hand: NO ADS!

(Anyone using Opera and wants a one-click cure to the latest "modern, fresher" design fail; drop me a email.)

[thomas k.]

Could be worse, I suppose

Not as bad as the recent "argh! give me an icepick so I can poke out my eyes, no, wait, this *is* an icepick poking out my eyes" Graun makeover, so kudos on that, at least.

The stationary menu bar at the top (with the pop-ups as you roll over) is a nice feature, I'll admit; Ars implemented this in their last remodel.

My pet peeve, though, is the inclusion of a "most read" section - why the fuck do I care what other people are reading? It's all about me, remember.

[Big-nosed Pengie]

Truly awful

Really - did you actually pay that 10 year old to do that?

Dreadful. Just dreadful.

[Dr Scrum Master]

When?

If I refreshed a page at some unknown time in the past it's quite useless for me to know that an article was posted n hours before that point. Tell me an absolute date and time, not some relative duration relative to an unknown point in time.

(And a big thumbs up to the, err, big thumbs down from most (all?) comments.)

[Fluffy Bunny]

Quite nice actually

I actually quite like it. My main complaint is that the navbar at the top of the screen whacks you in the face every time you move your mouse over it. It really needs to have quarter second delay before it activates. Otherwise it gets really anoying every time you go to click another Intenet Exploiter tab.

I have already gotten around the narrow column of text in the middle of a widescreen monitor by using the built-in zoom function in Intenet Exploiter.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Quite nice actually

"I have already gotten around the narrow column of text in the middle of a widescreen monitor by using the built-in zoom function in Intenet Exploiter."

Seriously? You like the idea of having to use a browser over-ride to make it usable when it's the job of the web designer/coder to make it work in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing I don't like

is the new look requires a lot more scrolling just to accommodate mobile users with its big squares (notice that I avoided the word tile... oh, rats!) and I miss the front page carousel.

[Anonymous Coward]

FFS

Jumpy headers just like Digital Spy? With your recent weekender TV reviews and this we really ARE heading down a road toward being another crap social site, no longer the BEST IT site on the net.

Who is trying to destroy this? Is it the bean counters? Only they would place style over content. I couldn't give a shit really about the look, as long as I can grab pages with wget (and I have to use that for offline reading because the Android app is SO piss poor).

I'm finding myself, after YEARS of supporting El Reg, about to piss off. For good.

[ElectricRook]

One word DailyMail

Go pirate the DailyMail app for mobile devices. Actually do this after taking penance for being stooge enough to reward some joker for selling you a makeover. Next you'll discover that you need to change your name to "globally align your corporate office with the customer imperative" or some other such nonsense. That would lead you to discover where Boot magazine went to after they changed their name to PC gamer.

I suppose you have already rewarded the BOFH for reassigning the IP addresses of the routers to bond with the harmonic convergence of the winter solstice.

sigh . . . just a sign that the end is near for el reg.

[ElectricRook]

April first?

Is it April first in ol' blighty?

[T. F. M. Reader]

I will not say that it is all awful, but while I am relatively indifferent to much of the change some things are really annoying compared to the old version. This is before I checked different resolutions and stuff, or the mobile version (less important to me, but when I do use my phone I always use the normal websites, as some of the others here). I am using a big screen now.

1. I like having as much of useful stuff on the screen as I can. This means that I really do not like the new layout which either leaves too much whitespace or presents too little information, depending on zoom level/font size.

2. No need for oversized pictures, cute and funny as they might be - I'll appreciate the humour even if the illustrations are smaller. They are nice to have and they take a lot of space, making me scroll to the really useful content.

3. The categories menu - Data Centre, Software, Networks, etc. - pops a huge bar with pictures and headlines that covers half of my bloody screen when the mouse accidentally hovers over it - please get rid of this horrible "feature".

4. Search has become much more difficult to use - you need to hover over the magnifying glass symbol and only then the search bar pops out, to which you need to carefully navigate and keep the mouse cursor over it at all times. Very cumbersome. It was much easier in the old version.

5. The pages load weirdly - the main frame appears shifted to the right with a lot of whitespace on the left. Only when I scroll down to the point where a part of the heading [right now, "El Reg redesign - leave your comment here"] is no longer visible the main frame jumps to the left and the right frame (with Most Read, Spotlight, etc.) appears. If I scroll up to the heading the right frame disappears again. Happens for articles and comments alike. Very annoying. This seems like a bug and not a feature.

6. I liked the Most Commented feature. I find an unusually significant proportion of comments fairly intelligent, and knowing which topics generated most active reaction was useful, whether or not I eventually clicked on the articles.

[Firefox on Linux with AB+, if that matters. AB+ has the option of not keeping empty placeholders on the page enable - mentioning that in case it is relevant to the amount of whitespace I see.]

[chivo243]

Jurassic Park Quote

Yes, we have the ability, and we can, but should we?? I'm thinking no

[Destroy All Monsters]

These large images!!

WHHHHHHYYY!!

They are always the same stock images ANYWAY. It's not like they would give any information.

[wolf471]

This is Horrible !! Please go back to the way you were

The redesign is horrible please revert to the earlier version. Especially marking read stories in grey rather than red. And no stupid pictures please

[Jaxn]

Boo

Liked the red read articles and no need for the "hero" article.

[Irony Deficient]

yet another viewpoint

First, some history: the article about El Reg’s last redesign can be read here, and a follow-up to it after five days can be seen here. Don’t forget to review the comments to those articles — plus ça change and all that. Like at least one other commentard above, my preferred design was the one that was replaced in 2008.

Regarding this redesign, my least favorite aspect of it is the increased presence and larger size of pictures; for me, each picture has a worth nowhere near a thousand words. Although I only use the Print Article feature rarely, I do in fact use it, unlike Top Stories, Most Read, Most Commented, Spotlight, Don’t Miss, and More from The Register, none of which I use. The stark monochrome of bold black text on a white background could do with a bit of softening. I don’t know if the masthead is a brighter shade of red than it used to be, but it certainly seems brighter against the new monochrome, and I wouldn’t mind it being darkened somewhat.

[Anonymous Coward]

Add More VALUE #2 - Some past articles are valuable. Organize them better & forget site redesign

Since you're actively redesigning the site, why not start organizing past articles into some kind of useful hierarchy or reference? .... Example: if a corporate client or family member asks me if they can trust Facebook/Whisper ... their new iOS / Android smartphone .... or a new LG-Smart-TV etc ... vis a vis privacy..... I'd like to be able to point them to relevant REG articles. But the search system is so hit and miss... So help us link enquiring minds to pertinent high quality Reg articles.

At the very least, add an article 'like' system (not comment counts) and improve the Search system...

[coolAG]

Start a revolution - bring back the old layout

The old layout was so much easier on the eyes. Easy to identify the links and a lot of content. Quite handy to scroll though quickly in a boring meeting or while surfing sitting in the loo.

Maybe we should start a revolution. Whats the digital equivalent of the occupy protests? Occupy vulture central?

Naah I'll just cry in my cup of horrible coffee from the office vending machine.

[tokyo-octopus]

Kneejerk reaction coming up: nuke it from low orbit, please.

After calming down and thinking rationally like an adult, I'll modify that to include "then plough it over and douse it in salt".

Please don't force me to deal with the restrictions of a device I'm *not actually using*.

Thank you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Add More VALUE #1 - Instead of redesigning the site make the Reg forums whole...

The Reg forums aren't forums, they're some kind of disposable transient noise...

Why are there no 'Sticky' threads and ongoing discussions related to Reg subject matter? Why bother to comment when there's no follow-up the next day? Tomorrow is just another set of articles with new throw-away comments.. Nothing is ever covered or discussed in any detail, and it just encourages flippant rants and idle comments. I switch off from the Reg for weeks or months because of this....

Instead, why not leverage the Reg as an active online community for tech? ... Engage them directly and encourage them to engage with each other... You know the mantra: be all you can be....

[Anonymous Coward]

Add More VALUE #3 - Depth of TECH INFO included in articles is too varied...

I recently asked the Reg for more detail on an article related to hacking / hijacking.... Namely: "does this run as a dedicated process or is it hooked directly into a windows sub-system? The article never mentions that, neither do any of the past Reg articles on CryptoLocker or similar strains of badness. This is a tech site, why not give us more insider detail".....

The Reg team responded by including a series of invaluable links in the article. Wow! Cheers to the Reg team and especially Chris and Drew. Because adding those kinds of links sets the Reg apart.. Similar links in future hacks would be great too!

So why not focus on similar quality instead of changing the site? Focus on more series-linked articles on everything from hacking to migration... But notify readers beforehand, so we can all stay tuned. At the moment its all too unpredictable or random from week to week...

[chivo243]

Can I opt out!

Really, this is really, really, not El Reg. Can I opt out and get the old familiar friend back? Please!

[Roger Varley]

Most Commented

Can we have the "Most Commented" tab back as well please!

[chivo243]

Re: Most Commented

I missed it immediately ,but maybe this forum would break the 32bit integer like Gangnam style did to youtube.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope

No, had a few hours of this and it's bloody awful. Won't be back.

[Ralph the Wonder Llama]

Ow my eyes :|

I look at El Reg several times a day, but crucially first thing in the morning. I had to shut my eyes to stop my retinas making a bid for freedom. Agree with most of the above, particularly and especially the first post, the one about the Grauniad (which has likewise ruined itself lately) and the menus. It's all flat, I can't find anything as effortlessly as I used to be able to, and it's just so bloody much like every other horrid "makeover" I've seen lately. Everyone else can be wrong, you know.

I'm going to take some Nurofen and lie down.

[Steve Davies 3]

No no and Thrice no

Those huse images are the killer. Why? Why? Why?

Didn't you think of all the poor saps who have to view this on their corporate mandated 1366x768 screens?

Then there is the way the posts are now ordered. What on earth is wrong with the old 'newest first' ordering?

At least /. gave people a chance to view their latest changes before they went live via beta.slashdot. Here? Fat chance.

IMHO, it wasn't broke but you somehow had to fix it.

now where's the Total and abject failure Icon when you need it?

[Jamie Jones]

While I'm at it, can we have a comments date back please?

This is a techie site, not bloody Facebook. If I want to see when a comment was madem the date was perfect - not like the current "in the last few minutes" or "one month ago".

Even worse, with javascript disbled, you just get the date of the post without the time!

Oh yeah, this design is responsible for global warming, U2, and that annoying chap off the tele.

[TRT]

Is it April the 1st already?

Or is 12/12 now Trolling Day?

[Headley_Grange]

You need some delay on the crap that flickers and drops down covering half my screen every time the cursor goes over it . It's bloody annoying and appears to be designed to bring on epilepsy. What was wrong with the old site? I hope you didn't spend any money on this.

[imanidiot]

I don't like it

It's bland, and uses only 1/3 of the available screen space and most of all it's just bland looking.

The lack of clear separation between articles on the front page doesn't help either. The old site used the gray lines for that, which improved readability imho.

[Anonymous Coward]

Aaaargh

I didn't think it was too bad to start with - text seemed larger/wider spaced and some pics a little too large.

Then I decided to turn Noscript off : fuck me that was awful! Way too much non-info and some of it moves as well.

I had to wash my eyes out with bleach before I was able to come back after restoring Noscript.

Please, please, please tone it down and consider that we don't necessarily respond well to the 'modern' styles. Unless, of course, this is all about satisfying the casual reader and not the commentards?

[MyNetHandle]

Can no longer right-click and open articles in a new tab - this means endless page-backs.

Looks like you are now sponsored by Google and forced to use their new Material Design styles.

There was nothing wrong with the original format. Ergo 'if it aint broke, don't fix it!'

[Caff]

new tab

Right click open in new tab no longer works?

[MyNetHandle]

Re: new tab

Only in IE so far. Sadly locked down to internet non-explorer in the workplace :(

[Wam]

No, no

Don't move my cheese.

[David M]

Horrible

I agree with all of the negative comments here. In particular the new layout is very wasteful of screen space, and I really hate to pop-out (or whatever they're called) menus that keep appearing when I don't want them, and covering up what I'm trying to read.

Suggestions:

1. Go back to the old site for the time being.

2. If you must do a redesign, make the focus on usability.

3. Make a beta of the new site available so that your readers can comment _before_ going live.

4. Your readers have huge cumulative experience in using and designing web-sites. Trust their opinions.

[ForthIsNotDead]

Utterly awful

I don't even know where to begin. It looks dumbed down like the BBC news website, and absolutely devoid of any character whatsoever. I can't even right click a link to open it in a new tab FFS. It's like something out of the 90's.

So el reg, it's been great, but I think it's time to move on.

[steamrunner]

In brief

* I like the simplification and cleanliness. This is good. To borrow someone else's words: you have decluttered nicely.

But...

* Bigger-scrolly-modern is good... on a tablet. Not on a desktop (or laptop), which should be bigger-modern only. Not too scrolly, at least to get going. I have a 24" monitor and I'm having to scroll *immediately* to see pretty much any actual words/content. Not cool.

* As for feeling the width: yes, I may sometimes run my browser in a 'half-width' window on one side of my screen, but usually I don't and thus end up having masses of blank white space at the sides and then — adding insult to injury — end up having to scroll to see anything, as noted above. This is a right pain. It's not hard to have responsive layouts for both 'wide' (desktop) and 'long' (tablet) devices.

Grade: Great effort, but needs more consideration for users and in the details. Please improve!

S.

[msknight]

In my very, extremely, honestly humble opinion...

Too much white. You're not publishing on grade B, "scrape and slide," bog roll here ... get some colour in the sodding thing before I suffer a mental breakdown and start to believe that I'm living in the arctic or something!

Also, I miss the five scrolling articles at the top. I mean ... now you've gone and made me have to press the refresh button! I mean ... I can feel the RSI claim coming on now... do you have the number for Apple's lawyer?

But come on 'Eel Reg. This amount of white is bound to ca... ARGH! ... ARGH! .. Oh my GOD ... I'm SNOW BLIND!!!

[Britt]

Gah

Me no likey.

Moving my mouse from browser tabs inflicts upon me a horrendous barrage of pop up menus.

You've reduced the site design to something lesser than the Facebook clickbait spam pages.

I don't want to be mean to the guys who've "worked hard" on this design, but fire them, now.

[ian_m]

Its poo.

Far far far far far far far, did I say far too much unoccupied white spice on screen for those of use viewing on decent sized wide screen monitors. Its like going back to using a 4:3 CRT TV...

[Mike Wilson]

Arrrghhhh... Drop down menus

Stuff that drops down/pops up/whatever when the mouse passes over is ghastly, infuriating UI design. Whoever thought this was a good idea? The web is heavily polluted with this wretched nonsense. To make it even worse, the behaviour is different on different sites, so it never becomes intuitive.

[TRT]

Re: Arrrghhhh... Drop down menus

I don't use those category menu items anyway. I just like the news in one big steaming pile that I can sift through in a few seconds flat looking for pop-out words of interest. Like Boobs or The Doctor or BOFH.

[Larhten]

Ew...

I hate it.

[AbelSoul]

May seem a bit sheep-like

... but I have to concur with the comments I've read; this redesign has been a misguided, ill-judged and altogether bolloxeded up exercise in readership alienation.

[davemcwish]

-1 Version please

Way too much whitespace at either side. Why ? Please don't telly me you'll be using that for ads that'll scroll. (Yes I know that you all need feeding but those type of ads are very annoying).

[Neil Barnes]

Has anyone mentioned the exploding menu bar?

Nah, I didn't think so; after all, it's such a subtle, gentle effect, hardly in your face at all.

So probably no-one would complain if you JUST LOST THE BLOODY THING.

NOW.

Thank you.

edit: p.s. what did you do to the link to the homepage at the *bottom* of every page? Bring it back, if you would be so kind.

[Anonymous Coward]

Two questions:

1. Didn't you already have a reasonable incremental update with the Channel Register's layout?

2. Couldn't you have spent some of the redesign money on finally getting a frigging SSL certificate?

[GreggS]

My eyes hurt!

Looks very PC Pro-ish now (and that's not necessarily a good thing). Also looks poor on a HD screen.

[Rob]

I see where you are going with this

I appreciate what you are trying to achieve, the layout is fine but you probably could have soften the blow by not flipping to so much stark white, as this is part of a phased approach I would have maybe phased your colour change in as well.

Look forward to what else you may do.

Out of professional interest, any chance you could share things like wireframes etc to see your thinking behind the changes (understand if you can't due to commercial sensitivity).

[YetAnotherPasswordToRemeber]

I'm not sure if it's just because it's new, but I find the redesign hard to navigate and I'm not in favour of the change. There appears to be a main story and the the other top stories don't seem to have much prominence. It's also like a page full of text so the individual stories are harder to see in the wall of text that makes up the main site. Also what's with the fixed column width, I'm using a 1920 x 1200 monitor and the page seems to be squeezed into the middle of the page.

[Anonymous Coward]

Urgh

Just tried this out on a laptop with zoom at 100% for the first time (previously been viewing on a phone).

It is comically bad. There is no need for them massive images and headlines at the top. In fact there is no need for headlines as it is always the same hackneyed BS every time

"PEAK APPLE!!"

"DEAD Steve JOBS bla bla bla SPEAKS FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE!!!!!11!!"

"LANDFILL ANDROID"

"Windows market share INCREASES. All HAIL our SUPREME LEADER Satya NADELLA"

[lorisarvendu]

If it ain't broke...

Is it easier to navigate? Not for me. Do I personally like the look of it? No. I now don't know where I am.

Was the old layout better? Well ok it was familiar, but yes it was better. It was simpler, with the newest items at the top and the oldest items working their way down the bottom to drop off onto the "older" pages. Nothing wrong with that.

I particularly dislike the "Top Stories" column, since it is obviously a self-fulfilling prophecy. Readers will tend to click on those stories because they're prominent, not because they're important or relevant, ...which then keeps them in the Top Stories column.

Ugly, Tabloidy, Just like every other web page-y. 3/10.

[ukgnome]

I can't find the kill it with fire button.

[Hughb]

Right! who's in charge?

Whoever is responsible for this mess needs to own up, come on! Who did it?

Messing with the reg like this feels like someone walked up to the cenotaph and painted it green.

Bad form Vulture Central, go the the back of the class and re do the entire assignment.

[Bill Fresher]

Don't like

And what's with the sidebar adverts that start on the right bar and carry across to the left bar (so left side of image is right bar, right side is left bar, with content inbetween) - what a mess.

[Lionel Baden]

Don mind th enw layout, but the popup on the main title is quite annoying.

Thank you for asking us for feedback

[Hellcat]

On-hover doesn't translate to touch. That is all.

Ok, just to be very clear. I can't touch and hover on the new navigation bar to then move to one of the sub-articles that appear. One of my most hated annoyances of using the tablet for any websites is having to switch to the trackpad because the desktop version has on-hover stuff.

[Adolph Clickbait]

I like it on the desktop at least

Needs to be responsive though, huge amount of whitespace.

Terrible on a mobile? Whats that you say ? Mobile websh1te, pah nice anecdote grandad but this is the 'teenies.

[Will Godfrey]

Well there's your answer

8 pages of overwhelmingly negative comments in less than 24 hours from people who mostly really know about this stuff.

However, the question is "Will you listen?"... I'm not holding my breath.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Well there's your answer

Do they know their stuff, or are they just resistant to change?

[plrndl]

We read El Reg for the content, not the presentation. Don't let the marketing morons get anywhere near. PLEASE!

[Anonymous Custard]

So now the big question

Having panned Microsoft for not listening to their customers, will el Reg be any better?

It looks to me like the general consensus of feedback on this new site design is that we all hate it. So will it stay anyway regardless of what we've all said, or could perhaps sense prevail and we go back to the old one? Or at least some sort of style option to switch or something to soften the impact.

Must admit if this glaring white inflexible monstrosity does stay then I'm not sure that I will be...

[msknight]

Drop Down Delay

Now that my eyes have somewhat adjusted to being snow-blind by the new page, can someone PLEASE put a response delay on the mouse over menu at the top ... or put it some place that doesn't sit between the page and the tools at the top of the bloody browser please?!

This has now got to the stage where I'm actually having to divert the mouse to the side of the screen in order to navigate past the menu; otherwise the sodding menu pops-down directly over the links I want to click on, so I've got to move the mouse down, beyond the menu so that it pops back up again, and then I can move the mouse up to click on the link that was underneath it.

Gah! ... Designer ... back ... out the ... shoot ... now! ... *rage*

[MrWibble]

The fecking pop up menu hover thing is really annoying when moving your mouse around the screen. Change it to show on click, please!

Liberal use of adblock / gresemonkey has made things a bit better (Don't worry, I allow the ads, but use it to block the carousel, pictures, etc.)

[ChrisPW]

Wow. Thats .... bad.

50% of my screen is still whitespace. Do you not have widescreen displays in your office??

The header is not rendered in is native size and has become nastily aliased.

25% of the content area is taken up pushing an old story (most of it an oversized image) that I read yesterday afternoon.

Top Stories: - appears to be a worse replacement of the old carousel.

Don't Miss: - I didn't, I read it yesterday, stop taking up space.

Most Read: - why is this at the top? If everybody is reading them then chances are I already have.

Why are there only about 4 colours? Much too much of a "wall of text".

At least the new content is appearing in order, shame I can only see the newest 3 without scrolling due to that massively oversized (and still old) story at the top.

[gregthecanuck]

Abort, retry, fail?

Using this on a 1920x1200 laptop...

For goodness sakes! The first article starts 2/3 way down the screen. Did ANYONE test this site for regular HD screen size usage? Copious usage/waste of white space, etc...

Thing is, this isn't a social media site. The same rules about large amounts of white space and "prettiness" don't apply here. We don't have users with grade 5 reading comprehension that need all the help they can get navigating the site.

Who is your target audience? Why do they come to this site?

It's great that the site layout is being tinkered with. Go for it. Maybe in future pilot as a beta site before giving us all heart attacks? ;-)

Thanks for listening.

[Return To Sender]

Consultant. Somebody mentioned a consultant?

Why do I get the horrible feeling that Bong's behind this...?

[Joseph Eoff]

Yuck!

1. Ugly

2. Too narrow (I only have a 1280x1024 screen, and it doesn't use all of the width)

3. Read links aren't clearly marked (go back to red instead of gray, and kill the change to red on hover)

4. Too many big pictures on the front page.

5. Looks way too much like TIFKAM

6. Get RID of that god damned flashing menu bar!! It pisses me off to have the damned thing hovering over the text of the articles, and the flashing menu entries when the mouse crosses it are just too fucking much. Seriously. Nail the damned thing to the top of the page and FUCKING LEAVE IT THERE!

You all seem to have made a list of all the things that should NOT be done on a web page, and then implemented all of them.

Just to clarify: http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/ is NOT a how to for web design.

[jake]

Dealing with rain here in Sonoma ...

... first look during a couple minutes of down-time?

Fucking awful. That persistent navigation bar needs to go away, just for a start. (Yes, I know, I can nuke it, and will).

[Simon Biles]

Sorry, but no, just, no.

[Mr Hugh Bris]

Can't remember the last time I actually went to the Reg front page - I just pick articles out of the RSS feed that look interesting, read them, and then straight back to the feed. Having seen the new design, I'll continue to do just that. It is, as politely mentioned above, not so very good.

Bit like the latest on-line Grauniad overhaul, really. Absolutely no attempt to think about readability. Pity.

[Valarian]

No

Just ... no.

The Reg has been a permanent fixture in my default tabset for YEARS. Why? Because once you train your advert-hider of choice to rip the junk off the sides, what's left is a concise list of titles and one-line leaders each of which links to a story, and highlights red once you've read it. They're in chronological order, so you know new stuff is at the top. They are dense, and take just a few seconds to scroll down, making it very easy to scan and select something of interest.

As someone posted early on, when the page loaded this morning I thought the CSS was b0rked. Two instinctive 'F5's later, and it dawned on me that this was deliberate.

I'll check back in a few days. If it still looks like it does today, I'll be looking elsewhere for my daily tech. news fix. Sorry, but the new layout is unfriendly, difficult to navigate, hard to read, and basically turns a routine 10-minute news catchup into a 30-minute UI fight. Sinofsky would be proud.

[Joseph Eoff]

Oh, by the way...

Tell your web designers to be expecting a visit from the BOFH.

When he shows up, they should avoid using the elevator...

Hmmpf. No "elevator out of order" icon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Aaargh, Fixed width text

Kill it fire....

Fixed width is the refuge of the unskilled.

Some of us actually have multiple windows open and really hate been forced by ignorant, smug, web designers to use full screen.

[Ribblethrop]

I preferred being able to right-click a link, and open that link in another tab. This no longer works for me :sad:

[MrXavia]

Works for me still... but then again Might be browser dependant?

[Conrad Longmore]

Too much whitespace

Things are all too far apart, there's too much whitespace.

I think you had it right in 1998 - https://web.archive.org/web/19981206084318/http://www.theregister.co.uk/

[MrXavia]

MY EYES....

Another site re-design that was not-needed by a site I visit daily....

And this is painful on the eyes, too much white, does not fill my browser... Fixed width sites are a curse on the world wide web...... It does NOT resize to fit my browser window when I shrink it!!!

No visual clues to the edge of the content or each article.., making it a big mess...

And those menu drop down hover overs, oh how annoying those are...

Revert please until you can fix the massive flaws

[Lee D]

Sigh.

Stop. Please.

Take that money away from your web designers. Go back to the "old" way.

Give the money to your server people instead.

Have them buy an SSL certificate, and spend a day making the site IPv6-capable.

You know, like a tech site.

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks amazing

At 67% zoom...

[Zog_but_not_the_first]

Re: Looks amazing

Agree. Is there something wrong with the paragraph spacing?

[BoldMan]

If you are running Adblock plus (and if not WHY not?) just add this to the custom filters to eliminate the annoying nav bar

theregister.co.uk###site_nav

Sorry ElReg this redesign is a disaster. I'm sorry for the guys who worked on it for them to get so much negative feedback, but this is an awful design. You've completely lost the idea of who your audience is - this isn't a bunch of media-luvvie Twitterati who gush over "modern", this is a tech savvy, traditionalist audience who additionally KNOW HOW THIS SHIT WORKS and can see bad design when it slaps them in the face with soiled Y-fronts!!!

[Steven 2]

Following the crowd

Rather than finding out how your readers use the site - you're forcing people into interacting in a completely different way, essentially re-learning how to use your site - and hoping they will rather than just leave.

Wouldn't normally comment, but I'm hoping each voiced "no" vote will help kill it.

What's wrong with small iterative changes that can be tested??? And are the 2015 lot bringing their own josticks and whalesong cd?

Awful. Just awful.

[Grommet]

My list of news sites I visit on a daily basis is shrinking. I have lost 4 sites from my bookmarks in the last 6 months because they redesigned....

Stop it with the tiled blocks.

A straight forward list of articles top to bottom of page is what I want in date order. Check out what ArsTechnica did. They give the option to have this type of crappy layout or a more conventional top to bottom list by published time. Give us a choice on this please.

[MacGuru]

How to ruin everyones Friday...

1st thought...MY EYES!!! Its like I'm stuck in some digital whiteout, with a sniff of the BBC ( which I could never understand / use )

Thenextthingisthatallthetextseemstojustrunsintoeachotheranditmakesitshardtoreadmaybeitsjustme

Please can we have the option of turning this off and going back to what was not broke and didn't need fixing..

And next time.. please don't ask the PFY to come up with the Web 2.0 design..

[Mark 110]

Not an improvement

Too much white space. Seems to make it harder to scan down for stories that interest me. Early days though.

Top stories are harder to identify not easier.

It still loads as a desktop site on my mobile. Why? Every other website knows I am using a mobile and presents me with a mobile version.

I look forward to agency redesign :-)

[Jason Bloomberg]

Those mouse-over pop-up menus are driving me nuts and the super-large photos are entirely pointless, add nothing to the stories. El Reg is unfortunately becoming just another dumbed-down user experience.

I don't have any belief things will change so it's time to tweak my Greasemonkey scripts to shape things into how I want them.

[TallPaul]

You've got rid of that annoying scrolling "top five stories" widget at the top

That alone gives the re-design an enormous thumbs up from me as it used to drive me mad. I hate pages which update in the corner of my eye.

[Sir Sham Cad]

Now I've seen the desktop site

Feedback:

Grey (mostly) axed from colour palette -

Personally I like a cleaner website so I like it

Top ad moved -

This is an improvement

Expanding section nav -

This is OK but only because th eonly thing the expanding navigation covers is the way too large image for the top story on the homepage

Fixed navbar -

OK, not really noticed any difference to be honest

Footer - more logical home for many links -

Agreed. It's a bit apologetic as a footer, though, kind of blending into the site and thereby completely hiding the "Older Stories" link from the eye. An "El Reg Red" bar instead of the thin grey dividing line would help this, I think.

Tidied up the right column - We think it is easier to navigate. -

Yes but is it me or has it also got a lot bigger, more distracting?

Pics at the top of nearly all stories - visual is good, right? -

Yes but those pics are far, far too big. They do not have to take up the full width of the content area. Smaller, left adjusted would be just fine, thanks.

Removed left column in the story page - declutter

Yes, this is good, thanks. Definite improvement.

Reduced number of “teaser” units at bottom of story page - declutter

Again, this is an improvement. less is more.

Social media buttons and tags moved - more logical places on the page

Never really used them but I do notice them more now so I'd say that's worked.

Front page headline carousel - rotating teasers, are they effective? Let's A/B test.

This is my biggest gripe. I used this all the bloody time. Go to El Reg, first thing I see is the rotating story carousel at the top, something catches my eye and I click. I also used it to navigate so I didn't have to hunt down the page for the story. The ginormous top story picture is a piss poor substitute.

Removed tabs and content buttons - tried to make content accessible.-

No comment to make as I've never used them but accessible is good I suppose.

Feature removed - most commented - will be unpopular with some - but ignored / unused by vast majority. We aim to rethink this feature - but at a later date.

I'm one of the vast majority (yay individualism!) so don't care.

Feature removed print article - not used - This is not cming back

No loss from my perspective.

[Nya]

Why change RegRed?

I knew the logo didn't look right and that red was burning my retinas. Someone changed RegRed from #fd0000 to bloody awful #ff0000 !!!! Bring back RegRed (and the entire old site frankly!).

[Anonymous Coward]

Timestamps

I can take the changes, will certainly take some getting used to, but one aspect which I really would *love* to see reverted is Article timestamps, as opposed to '19mins ago, 12 hours ago' etc....

Am I the only one? You could display in the browser TZ as opposed to just BST unless you are already doing that...

[Al fazed]

FUCKING GOD SAVE US !

Aaaaaaaarrrrgggghhhhh !!!!!

Look.

What is the fucking point in doing a redesign ?

Are you trying to keep staff that should have been shed in the last round of cost cutting ?

Oh no, I see now. You have to source and prepare less images before publishing a story ?

But really !!

You gleen more adverttising revenue from the twats with the massive banner images that cripple my dialupband connection here in dismal Dorset.

Well my fucking day's just got a whole lot shitter since your fucking annoying mini adverts keep poppong up to block my view of what I was reading.

I really have lost the plot with your devs.

Who designed this really annoying User Interfarce, Microsoft certifiable engineers ?

Stuff you fucking advertising in the shit house please and give me something I can read without blowing a sodding fuse everytime some innane seister muppet tries to flog me something I have no sodding use for and probably never will have.

No brownie points for you today.

Naughtie Register !

Pretty please !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Peter Martin]

Urrgh

Despite what the 'experts' say surely a screen is for showing content, not white space? If I wanted white space I'd pick up a sheet of A4 printer paper.

[TheresaJayne]

Bring back the old layout, even as an option

I read articles and keep going till the page is marked as read, now its a jumble with popouts and annoying adverts everywhere

BRING BACK THE OLD LAYOUT!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously?

What happened to the dev site where you could have taken feedback before this was rolled out? I won't delete my bookmark just yet, I'll come back next week and see if you've bowed to public opinion and reverted to the old (preferred) layout.

[Mark Allen]

Flashy Menu

Glad to see the pop-down menu has calmed down today. It is currently running at a much better reaction speed as now I can move my mouse over it without the manic strobes of yesterday.

IMHO I still think the images at the top of the pages are too big. We don't all have 4K monitors yet as I am still on a lowly 1920x1200. I assume the page designed had a big whizzy monitor and doesn't realise how much extra scrolling he now has us all doing.

Re: the all white glare. Any chance of having off white \ cream edges a bit like you see over on the BBC Sport pages? I end up having to zoom in to the El'Reg pages to try and get rid of the empty glaring border.

This one is only me... I realise this... but I often look at the site through an old Opera web browser and you seem to have killed the ZOOM option on the page. + on the keypad or the zoom option on my Logitech mouse is borked on this site now. (Yeah yeah, I know, stop using out of date Browsers...)

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Flashy Menu

"Glad to see the pop-down menu has calmed down today."

+1, a great improvement. Shame the pictures are still so big though ;-(

I wonder if they will use the Govt. mis-direction plan? You know, the one where a "leaked" report details massively unpopular "policies" which are immediately denied then they release the "proper" Bill which is is seriousldy bad and flawed but not as bad as the "leak" so the majority breath a sigh of relief and accept the "new" one :-(

[MJI]

Very annoying

Your mouse moves then something covers up what you are reading.

Pretty frustrating.

Lots of meaningless little pictures, why do we need them?

[Efros]

Visited links need to be red (or some other contrasty colour) rather than grey. Not keen on the layout, I really don't like that drop down menu at the top and I wish it would disappear when I scroll down the page. The fixed width thing is fine on my main desktop but acres of wasted space on my WS laptop.

[Jim 59]

Agree, visited links need to be more contrasty

as above.

[Tom Chiverton 1]

Giant NSFW side boob not cool.

[Paul Smith]

I Really like it!

Nah, just kidding

[Disko]

The good, the bad and the ugly...

The good - the site still looks relatively straightforward. I don't necessarily visit the Reg to see colours.

The bad - CAPS M&#$@!#%$@NG LOCK also these menus are locked and that is just wrong.

The ugly - Vultures are ugly. So is most tech I have no problem with that.

Verdict: lose the fresh modern stuff, keep it as simple as humanly possible. And for the love of Clippy don't change the basic structure, logic or layout. Having to scavenge around on a website to find familiar sections is enraging at best.

[vmistery]

Did someone look at the design of the theinquirer.net and go "We can go one better than that!" because that is how it feels - all red and white and too much spaaaaaaaaace I could fall in it. I could at the very least do with the white being a bit less white as I can feel the retina in my eyes slowly burning away. As for getting a design helper in? Good luck. Go back to the old reg look, possibly tart up the edges and go home happy.

[DwarfPants]

Not as bad as wired.co.uk

Its not as bad as Wired.co.uk where I feel the need to leave I hate it feedback every time I visit.

Still not a fan

[The Other Steve]

Too much pixels!

Pro Tip for commentards : Butthurt because it it doesn't fill your 4K monitor ? Either narrow your browser window or use this new thing we've had since 90s called 'zoom in'.

If you buy a proper computer, you'll find you can even do this using only two fingers on your trackpad.

Fuckwits.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Too much pixels!

Q: And just why in the fuck should I have to jack around with zoom on every page on the internet? A: Because web designers have no fucking clue.

Why did you call yourself a name in plural form?

[Richy Freeway]

That fixed menu at the top is already starting to get on my nerves, definitely lose that.

Moving my mouse vertically should not automatically pop anything up, if I want a menu, I'll click my left mouse button thanks.

[Tom 7]

Further proof that those that choose to go into design

should be shot.

It makes my eyes ache!

[Disko]

Yeah, if you could not have everything pop up whenever I'm trying to navigate to the menus

That would be great.

After browsing the site even for a little bit, the menu popups really get massively annoying.

Also, this menu bar moving around, and sticking to the top of the screen business is a nuisance.

Maybe it is better to limit the redesign to the things like social media buttons and ad placement

Thanks for asking our opinion thuogh, even though we would have given that anyway, it's nice to see some acknowledgement of the fact that people who use your site don't necessarily subscribe to your (designer's) views on user experience.

[detritus]

Hi Reg - sorry, I'm sure someone's put a lot of effort into this, but it's a distinct step backwards for me.

The site is now a generic and indistinct wall of words and even on desktop here, the new top layout feels like it's pushing content way below the visual fold. It feels visually like the top third of my browser space is being wasted.

I get the logic underpinning the decision to put the primary banner before the masthead, but it draws away from your 'tabloid newspaper' riffing, leaves redundant space on either side, and totally borks the flow for me. Above all else, this change is the most visually-unsettling for me.

I do like your new dropdowns, and the polished flat graphics are neater and a bit more pro - but readability-wise, I feel this is a retrograde step.

Sorry!

Signed,

detritus, a pompous ex-graphic designer type :)

xx

[Joseph Eoff]

One more thing

Lose the damned ridiculous "social media" buttons. Who in the fuck uses them? No one with a lick of sense, that's who.

[ScrollDown]

I don't care .. I like it

Fresh and up-to-date looking .. less like a nineties bulletin board. Good work, Kevin, Fenke, Murray and Marco. Thanks.

The Reg is still hard to scan quickly because of the rather silly and vaguely-comical-but-mainly-just-obscure-headings competition between your writers. However, it's worth the effort to basically ignore the headings for the gold within. So anyway, no worries, and thanks again Registers

[Vic]

Re: I don't care .. I like it

There seem to be a number of individuals who have registered simply to post on behalf of all of us...

Vic.

[bazza101]

Goodbye

As per title

[ThePascalLine]

Why did you feel the need to do that? Who told you the old design was no good? Who told you the new design looked OK? Why did you believe them?

[Toromoloscu]

Fucking Shite

This looks fucking shite. Old site please. That is all.

[Małopolska]

For me the site still has a couple of shortcomings:

1. It doesn't detect your browser type and use a mobile stylesheet when appropriate.

2. Upvoting/downvoting comments should be implemented in AJAX so that you don't get a new page every time.

[TeamEvil]

Oh. Not nice El Reg, not nice at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

ANyone else noticed...

...that as the complaints have increased we've stopped getting responses from Drew and co at El Reg.

It's that kind of blinkered "We'll ask for your opinion and then ignore it and go ahead with what we want to do regardless" attitude that I expect from the likes of Facebook and Google - not from an IT rag.

I think I'll read it solely through an RSS reader from now on.

[JudeKay]

Re: ANyone else noticed...

Rest assured, we are reading through all of the comments

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: ANyone else noticed...

I'd have thought you'd read enough by now.

Try flicking the switch to roll back the design instead of making us all make more comments.

[Jim 59]

Re: ANyone else noticed...

LOL. Pity the poor wretches who have to sift this noisome pile of overreaction. Some 'Tards are almost phoning the police because the provider of a free service is trying to improve the free service for FREE. Actual LOL.

But yeah that mouseover keeps covering up my comment edit window.

[StuartF]

Sucks Christmas Donkey Balls

Wez hads a grate christmas paarrty and came up with this new duzign which woz inspirited by a pool of sick.

Whattdaya fink peoples!

Weez luvs it....

Hic

Merry Christmas

[Dwarf]

A really bad dream, exept it wasn't

Yesterday, I had a really bad dream that someone who doesn't understand the user base of the web site did something stupid to the web site.

Then I woke up this morning and took a look and realised it wasn't a dream.

Roll back ... to previous template please.

You risk loosing someone who's been coming to this watering hole for about a decade !

Lots of meaningless pictures and pop-up menus. Less of the information we come here to see.

AND IT SHOUTS WITH BIG FONTS, but hides the things you want - like previously visited pages in slightly off-grey from the grey text.

If you are going to change, then at least do it properly.

[Gordo Rex]

Right Click

This has probably been covered...I didn't bother to read all of nasty comments (almost all of which I agree with). In the past, I would scan the headlines, right-clicking the interesting ones to open in a new tab and then working my way through the tabs.

Apparently, "newer, fresher, modern...." does not include this "older, staler, archaic, yet USEFUL" way of doing things.

Interestingly, about two weeks ago I began thinking of all the sites that I had abandoned in the past 20 years following a "newer, fresher, more content" redesign. I got up to 30, although I know I missed a few.

[Richard Taylor 2]

Sorry lads and ladettes - superficially nice but not a good read or way to read. To much flash (obi not Adobe) leas to a reduction in functionality. NIce try though. I see the Grauniad is making the same mistakes - actually rather more.

[kmac499]

Payment by results

Next time you commission a makeover, make the payment subject to the level of approval by the user base. I reckon the consultants owe you a small fortune.

It's Horrible; low density, big text looks like it's designed for primary school kids.

It also looks like it's come from an early version of the Jony Ives design playbook, and we all know how much Reg Readers love that...

[Alfred 2]

It's

crap.

[G R Goslin]

Thumbs Down

No, I didn't like it. When it first came up, I thought my screen settings had gone haywire. Try as I might, I couldn't get it to look nice. And still can't No, no, no, no, Vulture If you MUST change things, make them better, not worse. Now where have I said that before?

[myhandler]

You need to get an experienced traditional newspaper typographer involved. Someone who understands vertical rules.

Front page is hideous, yet strikingly characterless.

Body pages - meh - don't make the mostly pointless feature pic so damn big.

Um, site is not even responsive?

[Joseph Eoff]

Even worse

Just checked the site in IE8 instead of firefox.

1. Kill the flashing and blinking in the "Cash and Carrion" advertisement.

2. The banner ad above the Register header is just retarded.

3. You must be getting really well paid by EMC - I count three ads for them on the front page.

4. The "Older Stories" link looks so small and lost down there at the bottom of the page. It looks almost ashamed of itself down there.

[jaycee331]

Change for changes sake

That's all.

[Chillijohn]

Currently broken

I used to skim the front page for interesting stories then right-click on any I found and open them in separate tabs to read at my leisure. I'm unlikely to go back to the main page more than twice so if you get funding from how many people see the adverts you'll be getting far less page views from me.

...and that's if I do keep coming back.

Also from a visual accessibility point of view, block capitals are harder to read (as I've already seen pointed out) because you can't see the shape of letters and a lot of people find too much white glaring (which is why some smartphone platforms let you invert the colour scheme).

[strawman]

I can probably get used to it

The big picture on the front page, the pictures in the drop down menu, and the eye hurting black on white bold headlines on the stories are pretty annoying though.

The rest of it looks pretty much change for the sake of change.

[Benjol]

Confession: I haven't read through all of the comments...

I realise there's an element of "Who moved my cheese?!" in the reactions here, so I'm trying to be balanced, objective, and constructive.

I can live with most of the changes, but on the home page:

- I would like my red 'visited' colour back

- I liked the 'hot topics' carousel - though not necessarily the animation - rather more than the single big image now present

- I 'need' horizontal lines between the articles, they just feel too 'floaty' and destabilising

- I don't really like auto-popout-on-rollover, but it should be way slower to react

- On the article pages, the header image is WAY too big. If you really want to stick an image in there, leave it on the left in that big empty white column

[Jeff Deacon]

Change for the sake of change

Of course if we are happy with the way things were, then there would be no campaign to keep them that way unless people do idiot things in the name of (faux) progress.

Is this a news site? Or a showcase for a graphic arts developer?

Let's just stick to the news. Let's just have reliable, factual, current information. Let's leave the artistic fads to others.

[Jim 59]

LOGOWATCH

Lester Haines will be along in a minute to provide the josticks-and-whalesong hatchet job.

[ElReg!comments!Pierre]

Still works on w3m, so far so good

Nothing different that I noticed when using w3m; good.

I also tried on a graphical browser, and it looks a bit like a website designed for cell phones: the mousover images and the "featured" images are humongous, as is the text, resulting in only a tiny part of the page height being displayed at once. "zooming out" kinda fixes that but then the fixed width feels a bit awkward.

And I like grey, very stylish. Good thing it's not entirely gone.

Overall it's not too bad, if you really had to. We'll get used to it. Or we'll use text-mode browsers.

[Anonymous Coward]

I fear I'm only repeating what others have said...

...but it's a right sodding FUBAR.

There's a lovely old saying: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

[Swarthy]

The really large images are not beneficial.

the ginormo-pics at the top of each article add nothing to the content, necessitate scrolling, and are a bit ugly. I would like to see them go.

As for the lay out, would it be possible to to down the white? I can accept the throwing out of 2/3rds of the useful screen space, but must it be glaring white? Maybe try something along the lines of #FEF1F0 (fum)?

I feel I should also chime in on the visited links coloration.. the grey is not quite enough of a change to figure out where I left off easily, especially with the "more piccies" policy. I did like the red visited links.

[Zem]

Changes

I like the cleaner look, but the topics automatically dropping as the cursor passes over IS VERY ANNOYING! I also miss the easy to locate print button that was found in the leftmost frame.

[Leesantiques]

Not everyone hates a web design change on just first or even second sight. Sometimes the hate lives on for the 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc. on to infinity sight.......

I have a dream that one day a web sight will be redesigned - with the redesign being a true improvement. I'm still waiting....... :-(

Here's a suggestion - please return the site to the old look and feel, and then put the nice web developers on vacation for a loooooooonnnnnnggggg time!!

One good thing - the redesign wasn't as bad as some I've seen. NBC News and the U.S. Post Office both managed to make their sites unusable (although at least the Post Office has improved from that debacle....)

[Enki]

Hover

The popup mouse hover has too short of a delay before the popup. I get lots of distracting popups when I am scrolling using my touchpad. If you add a couple seconds, you will retain the effect while allowing for easier reading and scrolling.

[chivo243]

On closer observation

this looks like some dodgy content management package.... I! Think! Yahoo! Uses! The! Same! Pacakage!

[Anonymous Coward]

Next time, look up the term responsive web design.

[Anomalous Cowturd]

It's shite Roy.

Just put it back how it was on Wednesday.

Thanks.

[romanempire]

Shit

Too much white space doing nothing. Too spread out.

Too much work to see at which stories might be worth reading.

P.

[TheWeddingPhotographer]

like it

I like it. Really needs to be responsive, and loose the advert above the red header

[MJI]

Pictures too big

Thought it was a new article but was an older one

Just had a huge picture of Turdoch.

NOT VERY PLEASANT!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm late to the party. Or gang bang, looks like. I'm old, and therefore required to hate any change, and I do. Also get off my bastard lawn. I don't hate it as much as some previous posters seem to; partly because I do design work myself and may have been drinking the cool aid too long; and also because the way I use the Reg and possession of a mouse with a scroller wheel means that I'm not too stressed by scrolling...I can see that those who have to swipe their way around would be annoyed. Some comments then:

● Holy shit that is white. El Reg is normally the first site I visit while I get outside of a coffee and wait for some neurons to warm up. The overall impression on the retinas could be fairly described as 'violent', I feel. Could do with some colour or something to take the edge off. Or El Reg could issue everyone with tanning goggles.

● Harder to read. Probably as a result of everything being adrift in a snowscape; but maybe also partly that I'm not used to it yet.

● Big picture at the top is a pointless waste of space - I preferred the old, 5-story bit. It looked better; packed more info in, and didn't make me feel like I'm looking at a children's book.

● Grey vlink. That'll have to go...you actually have to concentrate and pay attention to see what's been read. The old red or maybe a darker red if you feel like being a bit more subtle (#730000 is a darker shade of the banner colour; with the added bonus that you could claim it was Marsala (Pantone's new colour of the year) and you'd get a whole year of free hipster-trolling thrown in).

● Most commented - I used that, periodically, as a way of finding stories that I wouldn't otherwise have bothered with going by the title alone.

● Huge picture at the top of stories - pointless and I wouldn't have thought it would endear you to people with data limits.

● People need to be able to open stories in a new tab. The issue isn't affecting me, but you need to fix it for people who it is. That would be a deal-breaker for me.

S'pect I'll get used to it; but overall it's a step in the wrong direction IMO.

[Joseph Eoff]

I think it is time to give up

The "visited link" coloring doesn't seem to work right.

When the link is given in two places on the page, and I click on one of them, then usually both change to the "visited link" color.

That doesn't work here now.

Example:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/12/tor_takes_off_the_gloves_after_sustained_harassment_of_staffer/

Has a normal story link, and also a "Don't Miss" link. Both point to the same address, so both should show as visited. Only the normal story link shows the "visited link" color, though.

It seems the href for "Don't Miss" contains some kind of half assed relative link (/2014/12/12/tor_takes_off_the_gloves_after_sustained_harassment_of_staffer/) whereas the regular story link has the full address (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/12/tor_takes_off_the_gloves_after_sustained_harassment_of_staffer/)

Odd that the Firefox "show source" didn't work. I had to take Firebug after the damned thing to see what was going on.

I think we need a "more FAIL" icon.

[8Ace]

Not great guys

I mean who though that sticking a ginormous image at the top of each story, leaving a couple of paragraphs of text visible was a good idea?

What's with all the empty space?

What's with the grey "visited" links. OK it's different but other than that what's the point, it makes it harder to see where I've been.

The category heading above each story on the front page... what's that , some sort of eye test? A bit bigger please.

Overall I'd have to rate the changes as pretty poor.

[David Pollard]

Adblock Plus seems to do the trick

Although there may be a few articles which aren't so good without the pictures, in general the site seems much improved when they are blocked. Thanks to ABP it's possible to read the home page without too much effort. I'd imagine most people visit the Reg to read and hopefully learn something useful rather than to gawp.

[Swarthy]

Re: Adblock Plus seems to do the trick

I actually turned on my ad blocker, just to nix the BuzzFeed-esq pictures it does tremendously improve readability, although I still have a large 'broken image' box where the illustration was designed to be. I would rather have that "feature" removed, and then I could disable my ad blocker for El Reg again.

[Terrence Bayrock]

My eyeballs still hurt...Where's my sunglasses

Get RID OF IT!

If you are not paying any attention to your reader's views as so eloquently stated herein, then your adverts will find empty eyesockets and will go away to find a new home. I don't mind a reasonable set of adverts as I understand the economics of some of these websites. Pissing off your reader base accomplishes the EXACT OPPOSITE of what you want to achieve (at least, what I assume you want to achieve). Maybe Dr Evil is messing around with your UA developers.........

The better is the enemy of the good !

Take whichever style artist put the scheme together , tie him(or her or them) down to a seat in front of a monitor and staple their eyes open looking into the monitor tuned to the home page. Then 2 minutes later call the local insane asylum and register those artists as new occupants. Or is that cruel and inhuman punishment?

In a word AAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Please please PLEASE , change it back.

[Jimbo in Thailand]

Compared to the previous layout it sucks...

Your previous layout was easy on the eyes, very efficiently organized so a pleasure to peruse. This new sophomoric layout is TOO WHITE and hurts my eyes. The new layout is also extremely inefficient and appears disorganized. Did I mention it's really inefficient? Then there are the incredibly annoying mouseover popup images on the top nav bar. It would help if you would add a mouseover event delay so we can actually choose to see what images you have for us, or not. Finally, bring back the top 5 headline news, etc. carousel, but this time make it larger hence easier to navigate... and make it work for Android devices as it never worked on my SG Note 2.

Based on all these negative comments I've just read you've got some fast fixin' to do... and pronto!

Good luck!

[KroSha]

1) Please fix the Nav bar to the Reg banner, not the top of the screen. It's feckin' annoying. If I want it, I know where it is and one keypress takes me back there.

2) Carousel please!

[Terrence Bayrock]

Last Comment for now

My

eyeballs . . . . . have . . . . . settled . . . . . Down a bit.

- - - -

.

Maybe . . . . . they . . . . . thought . . . . they . . . . have . . . . a . . . . good . . . . .design?

.

.

Maybe . . . . . it . . . . . .is . . . . . .a . . . . . .caffeine . . . . . .substitute?

.

.

Maybe . . . . .they . . . . .can't . . . . .trust . . . . .their . . . . .readership . . . . .to . . . . .tell . . . . .a . . . . .good . . . . .design . . . . .from . . . . .a . . . . .bad . . . . .one.

.

.

maybe . . . . . the . . . . .editors . . . . . / . . . . .publishers . . . . .will . . . . .come . . . . .to . . . . .their . . . . .senses . . . . .

.

.

.

There's my morning vent/rant/thoughtful comments

(Note; I had to use periods as spaces since the editor did the {sensible} thing and got rid of my previous attempt to sue extra spaces.

[Anonymous Coward]

Crap.

[gloucester]

Better without Javascript, but still worse than before

Well I've moved the main site from allowed to forbidden in NoScript and that helps (no stupid menu pop-ups in articles, and actual article post times on the front page rather than '1 day ago'), but still way way too much white everywhere, plus the massive pic at the top of every article.

Tried AdBlocking the social crap buttons to prevent accidental clickage, which removed the twit, FB and G+ icons but left the coloured circles they sit upon; the ex-twit and ex-G+ circles still seem to be active links unfortunately, though not the FB one.

Please roll this back.

[Joseph Eoff]

Better

Noscript and ABE fix the worst of the irritating problems, leaving just the ugly.

Sad when you have to strip all of the advanced features out of a site to make it usable.

PS:

Even the comment editor is better without js.

[Only me!]

Why, why

It was not perfect before, but just required tweaks to fix things.

As the hoards before me have said......Pics too large, text to errr...wrong somehow, headline stories, large areas of purest white m'lord.

I have bee back a few times now and each time I immediately find myself zooming in and out, which just feels like I have stumbled across a stupid childish game of spot the story! Opps I read that one already, but forgot minus 10 points!

It's ok the mobile app will save the day.....of wait a sec..................

[mrmond]

It's not a practical joke?

At first I thought my browser was broken.

Or that you'd been hacked.

Then I realised this is for real.

Oh dear.

[Little Mouse]

Shark Sandwich?

Shit Sandwich.

[TRT]

Well actually...

I rather like it. Some of the metaphysical imagery is particularly effective. And there are interesting rhythmic devices which seem to counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor of the humanity or vogonity of the editor's compassionate soul which strives through the medium of the page structure to sublimate this, transcend that and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of the other. And one is left with a profound and vivid insight into... into.. whatever it is the website is about!

No, I'm only fooling. It's shit. Take it down to number 2 airlock and throw it out. Shoot it first if you want.

[BoldMan]

Adblock filters to make the site work better

Try adding these filters to your Adblock - gets rid of the floating nav bar, the "Don't miss" block and the idiotically large top image on the front page

theregister.co.uk###site_nav

www.theregister.co.uk##.dont_miss.dcl

www.theregister.co.uk###top_tease

[MrWibble]

Re: Adblock filters to make the site work better

Add in

theregister.co.uk##.article_img

to get rid of the stupidly big image at the top of each article.

[rcorrect]

I don't like the centered logo at the top and that huge preview is a waste of space

[bill 36]

I've tried all day to like this

Really i have.....

On the Sammy S5 it looks much better but.....

In the (Chromium) browser on the desktop, awful.

Everything about it just looks wrong, from font size to style. I actually find it difficult to read.

If improving the mobile experience was the goal, then you achieved it but ..........

Hope that helps

[TonyBanjo]

Oh Dear©

I hope you didn't pay for this fail.

[Nameless Dread]

El Reg re-HASH

Minus(s)es -

Lead image - TOO BIG! - waste of space / bandwidth - shrink it, please

Text size - TOO BIG! - waste of screen area - re-do as it was, please

Drop-down menus near top - annoying - kill them, please

Loss of half-dozen recent stories + images near top - bring back, please

Neutrals -

Grey text for links used recently - fine

Wish list -

Author by-line - always good to locate O'ski ;-| (He wasn't guilty of the latest layout, I hope ?)

Plus(s)es -

Social media buttons and tags moved - Hallelujah!

... er ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You should make it look a bit more like iOS.

That'd be sweet.

[hairydog]

This is truly horrible. It was a nice, neat concise layout. Now it's like a playschool chart.Massive fail. How about reverting to the old design?

[Morrie Wyatt]

I'll admit to wondering

Where in hell the PFY has got to with that roll of carpet and bag of quicklime?

[Valeyard]

640*480 resolution

looks fine on my windows 95 640*480 PC

I don't know what everyone's moaning about

Also i LOVE font size 70 anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

About the only thing left out ..

.. is the <blink> tag :).

I'm going to use this for a bit - from experience I know that first impressions may be deceptive, other than when they involve Microsoft products. So far, I prefer the previous format other than that I can read this site without any need for reading glasses. Which means an annoying lot of scrolling..

[Anonymous Coward]

100%

Everything you changed you got 100% wrong.

At least Adblock reduces the pain.

[RG10122]

WTF Indeed. This redesign, is not an improvement.

A very poor and annoying redesign. I tend to agree with most of the people here.

That said, I have no faith that the site team will do the right thing, and revert back to the old site. They're probably hiding their heads in SHAME.. and hoping the noise will quieten down.

I've published a style on userstyles.org. If you're using the 'stylish' plugin on firefox this can fix what I think are the worst offenders in the new layout.

http://is.gd/9lKj8E

XW

[Tomosaurus]

You got this so wrong

I am a long time Reg lurker. I have never commented once in the three years I've been religiously visiting your site. I've gone out of my way to sign up so that I can let you know that your new design is fucking goddamn awful.

I hate it with the force of a thousand suns and I can't begin to describe how hard it is for my eyes to jump to content I want. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. Please restore the old design and fire whoever designed this abomination. Fail.

[skizzerz]

All-caps are a bane to all existence

I do not understand the fixation on making navigation headers all-caps. It's been recommended time and again that making things in all-caps decreases usability due to removing shape cues from the words (since each letter is now the same size) -- there is a decent writeup on this on UX Movement[1]. While other studies show that this is simply due to practice/learned behavior[2], it still results in increased time spent reading and comprehending the title bar to determine areas of possible interest.

Also, I'm not sure if you're being cute and changing the bar text based on IP geolocation, but the title reads "DATA CENTER" for me (I'm in the US). Since I'm visiting a co.uk site, I'd rather see the British spelling of "Data Centre" in the navigation bar.

As for positives, I do like the reduced clutter, and article images when done right can help provide a glimpse at what the article is covering as well as setting the overall tone of how the text is read. Giving an option for logged-in users to disable it may be for the best, however, as by looking at the comment thread not everyone feels that way. I have no opinion on the visited link color; I'm rather young so I find the grey just as easy to pick out as the former red (whereas the grey actually de-emphasizes the article whereas the red makes it stand out more, I'm guessing this was the basis of the change).

[1] http://uxmovement.com/content/all-caps-hard-for-users-to-read/

[2] http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/wordrecognition.aspx - This article cites papers by three authors Woodward, Smith, and Fisher. I was able to find the Smith and Fisher papers freely available online via a quick search as well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: All-caps are a bane to all existence

I have forwarded your comment to our chief sub-editor.

[FraserGJ]

The changes aren't too bad - I've seen worse.

All I'll say:

1) Far too much white - hurts my eyes when viewing for long periods

2) Bars of solid white down the side also too big - I assume they are going to be filled with full height, multi-colour flash advertising in due course though (please don't)

3) Picture at the top of the article is too big - the one in the "UK flights CRIPPLED" article is 429px high and I can only see 2 lines of the actual article (3 once notice about cookies is closed)

4) Why is the section the article is in shown in big letters on the top of the right hand bar. Couldn't you make the image smaller and put it there instead. The section isn't needed as it's highlighted on top bar instead

5) Related topics should be at bottom of article really as you'll be looking for related topics AFTER you've finished reading the article

6) The search box isn't very big, you could swap entire nav bar for search bar and include other options for searching too

7) The images in the nav bar hover are too big too - couldn't you put the text alongside smaller version of each image? I know you could probably only fit 3 articles in but you could have 2 rows and fit 6 articles in the same space!

8) I know The Reg gets money from advertising but the advert at the top of each page is taller than the red header bar on each page. Surely it should be the other way around?

I'm sure I'll spot other stuff and post about that when I can

[albaleo]

"Far too much white - hurts my eyes when viewing for long periods"

This, this, this!

I can't make comments about other changes as I'm blinded to them.

[TheDillinquent]

Its all gone a bit Steve ¡Bong!

Hasn't it.

[drsolly]

Designered

You got a graphics designer in, didn't you. You've been designered, I can tell. By someone who thinks that all computers are exactly the same as his, with the same screen pixel counts, by someone who doesn't care whether an already-read article looks almost the same as one they haven't read, and who is so sure of their skills, that they didn't suggest allowing "Register-classic" as an alternative.

The only cure for being designered, is to fire the designer.

[Spirited Sam]

Again?

Geez, just getting used to the old site design after six years and you go and change it again. I'm outa here and...omg, LASER CANNON WARSHIP !!! Uh, never mind, see ya later, good job, whatever.

[Wild Bill]

Seriously...

...everyone needs to calm down. You sound like petulant children. The site redesign is fine. A bit bland maybe, but I suspect that is actually an attempt by El Reg to placate it's stick in the mud audience. I found it a bit of a shock this morning when I first looked at it. This afternoon I'm finding I've adjusted a little to it. Next week I suspect that I, and most other users, will have forgotten what the old site looked like and will wonder what all the fuss was about. Like every website redesign ever.

One thing I miss - the most commented articles block. I do hope that comes back.

Word.

[Rusty 1]

Egyptian Hieroglyphic tablets

They got it right.

Nice high density content.

No nasty white borders.

No dynamic mouse-over events (they probably had too many cats to know about mice)

3-5 millennia later we, sorry, you, are behaving like potential members of the B Ark.

Why? Just why?

[mustbme]

Acid

I just threw up in my mouth. Thanks.

[attackcat]

New design, annoyingly "WEEKEND EDITION" appears to the left on top of the text of each article. Safari on a macbook pro retina, latest versions, java etc disabled.

[Anonymous Coward]

Possible bug? Can't replicate immediately

We'll have a look on Monday but in the meantime, if you can spare the time, please send us screenshot to [e-mail]

[Naughtyhorse]

Recent changes....

Site design... whatever

Changing LP's mind on global warming???

OUTSTANDING JOB.

(lets see if this post sneaks past the 'mustn't take the piss out of the painful awakening to reality of our glorious leader' filter)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Recent changes....

No need to sneak anything past me, Naughtyhorse.

[Mike VandeVelde]

NEEDS MOAR WHITE

what about just making the no man's land left & right a pale pale grey? make my screen a little bit less of a search light? give me a little bit less of a tan whilst reading?

the image at the top of each article could be presented at about 20% of its current size. one of those rare situations where css actually considered the use case during design of the specifications, something float was actually designed for instead of all the contortions is actually used for in practice, i think the coder will probably jump at the chance. let there be some text down the side of it, let some of the article show below it.

im not too bent out of shape about it over all. the content is still there and its really not much if any more difficult to get to.

[Lee D]

"This is going well … just letting you know that we are listening to your feedback on the redesign."

Er... unless you have some kind of profanity filter that changes all the comments I've seen into positive things about bunnies... no, you're not.

"And also reminding you that this design is the first major change to the site in six years."

Six years is NOT a long time. Not at all. And you can lose half your readership in minutes. The reason you don't do major redesigns is that, online, it's like a brand makeover. You only do it if you have something you wish to hide, and people will never like it.

"However, 90 per cent of the work in this redesign comprises changes under the hood that allow us to test and roll out iterations very quickly."

Then why not start with the new system that allows changes, but with a replica of the old design? Then roll out changes one at a time. Like, you know, upgrades, testing, smooth transitions, etc.

"We have introduced a half-second delay before the mouseover triggers the drop down navbar."

You fixed a bug.

"Readers have reported two bugs"

You fixed more bugs.

What you haven't fixed is the DESIGN. And given that it's the design people are moaning about, maybe fix that too? Or is this a "we spent money on a new design, so sod you if you don't like it" kind of deal? Like Slashdot's overhaul? That went down well.

"On the loss of the print icon - rarely used, not coming back - and bemoaned by a couple of readers. We still support this feature and you are welcome to get hacking."

I read: We don't care that you used to use it, we don't care that it would be the work of moments to get it going again, you can do it your damn self if you want it.

Nice way to treat readers.

Honestly? I will have more respect for The Reg is they backtracked and then brought things in piecemeal than did this "Here, shove that down your throat and tell us how good we are".

And, guys? SSL or IPv6, I'd have applauded. And it would have required ZERO DESIGN SKILLS.

[Oninoshiko]

"And it would have required ZERO DESIGN SKILLS."

Which, coincidentally, is exactly what they have demonstrated here.

[Mellifluous]

Bring back the print icon

I for one, like the print icon on news articles, one can often print stuff without all the annoying ads.

This new design is indeed horrible, why don't you just start a poll

[Ted's Toy]

Ego boosting failure

Total waste of effort. It is a childs design obvously done by someone who has to fix unbroken things so that his/her ego is displayed for all to see what a twit he/she is. Looks like a way to get oneself fied.

[kmac499]

Change of Headline

"Cisco to release flying Pig"

should be changed to

"El Reg actually released flying load of pig exhaust.."

BTW anyone looked at the advertise with us page, that's not half bad.

[Kepler]

PROPER Time Stamps!!!

Please, at the very least bring back actual date and time stamps!

It's really handy and helpful to be able to see precisely when a story was posted (or modified). Not just in the article itself, once one has opened it, but on El Reg's main page, where all of the most recent articles are listed. A rounded number of hours ago — let alone days — is not nearly so helpful or useful as an actual timestamp (like "11 Dec 03:04").

[Kepler]

Re: PROPER Time Stamps!!!

The biggest problem with the new temporal labels is that they are only approximate, due to their being rounded. That alone makes them inherently inaccurate, and therefore less useful.

However, because they also are relative (all being followed by an implicit but omitted "ago"), they quickly become obsolete and even more inaccurate with the passage of time!

One can update them by refreshing the page, of course, but then some or all of the stories will disappear from the page (having been bumped off the bottom by newer articles that have been posted above)! If, as I do, one keeps deliberately unrefreshed older versions of the main page open in separate tabs, all of the newfangled* relative times will soon be out of date and seriously inaccurate (saying "3 hrs" when it has now been 12; "20 hrs" when it has now been well over a day; "1 day" when it has actually been 3 days, or 5; and so on).

In contrast, a proper date and time stamp will be as accurate 5 months from now as it was the day the article was posted.

.

* Yes, I know the "Older stories"/"MORE STORIES" view** (http://www.theregister.co.uk/earlier/1/, http://www.theregister.co.uk/earlier/2/, and so on) has been using these relative, approximate date and time indicators for ages, so they're not actually new at all. But that's the main reason why I keep old versions of the main page open, instead of using the "Older stories"/"MORE STORIES" view, despite its several advantages over the main page's view!*** You should start using proper date and time stamps there as well!

.

** The link you click on to get to it says "Older stories", but the heading of the page once you get there reads "MORE STORIES".

.

*** Every article listed in the "Older stories"/"MORE STORIES" view is accompanied by a tailored, article-specific picture and a longer and much more helpful descriptive blurb. But these advantages are offset by the main page's easier-to-use 3-column view, its use (until now) of proper date and time stamps, and the fact that every once in a blue moon a story will appear on the main page but never make it to the "Older stories"/"MORE STORIES" section. Which means you see it on the main page or you never see it at all.

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: PROPER Time Stamps!!!

I want proper time stamps so that I can reply specifically to one comment in a comment trail, and have everybody know exactly to what I was referring. It's not enough to use the posters name or the title, because we get into conversations with each other on the threads, keeping the comment the same.

Relative timestamps are no bloody use at all!

[codejunky]

Very sorry reg

I like reading your articles, I like the comments sections attached to the articles, but this looks like the style sheet forgot to load.

I know you want something looking better, and I can understand the looks you have chosen even if I dont agree. However the previous layout made it very easy on the home page to see what I have and havnt read. I have square monitors because I dont like widescreen and from what I have read above I have the screen that you are targeting. But the fact that I cant see what I have and havnt read easily without the topics being grouped means that I have no idea what I have and havnt seen.

If you could make a page (not asking that you change your homepage) that made the functionality of the old view available then I would find that very useful (or point me to it if you have one already).

[Mage]

Listening to feedback?

with fingers in ears and going La La La?

The main image is INSANELY large

The others are too big.

The design is like a content lacking coffee table book for 2 year olds. Please put it the way it was, or at least a text rich design for grown ups?

This is still rubbish. Tinkering with it is pointless. SCRAP IT.

Someone tell me when the site is usable again.

[Charlie Clark]

Print button?

Never fucking used one. That's what print stylesheets are for which you seem to have overlooked. :-(

Re. the general redesign: contrast is too stark. I've no problem with whitespace but the proportions aren't right.

HTML is better but still not making use of nice HTML5 sematics such as the nav tag. Embrace it, it will make things a lot easier.

Don't mind the fixed navigation, makes sense on long pages, but it's one of the first things to get lost in this black and white mix.

[DrGoon]

Eh

I assume this site design came free with some discount web site authoring tool that you got at PC World.

[coderguy]

What the f*

Seriously. I'm trying to view the site @1920x1024 This is hideous. You guys need to back away from the tablet & phones and remember that most people visit from work. You know, where we're forced to used a proper screen an keyboard FFS.

[keithpeter]

Boxes floating on a grid

The wide monitor thing.

Just about ok on a small laptop. Daft on a large (27") monitor.

Can't you do the responsive thing with extra columns of content appearing on wider monitors?

PS: icon for the team that did the work even though people don't like it much.

[Anonymous Coward]

Links still not being marked as read

Why was this not counted as a bug?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Links still not being marked as read

Links had had read state since launch.

Two possibilities spring to mind:

The difference in shade between read not read is not distinct enough - for you? for others?

A browser-specific issue.

Please check. If not former, tell us what browser you are using?

[Kepler]

Re: Links still not being marked as read

In Chrome under Windows 8.1, Drew, the difference between not read and read is the difference between black and dark charcoal grey. And this despite your having said somewhere (I forget where, and couldn't find it just now) that the site's being too monochromatic was one of the problems you were trying to address!

The site's previous use of bright red and bright blue was certainly helpful in the visual cue department.

[BongoJoe]

Metrosexual crap

Stop trying to be so bloody hip and trendy. This is something like the Grauniad would have come up with in the 90s if it had the internet.

Too much space lost on a pointless picture at the top. I want information not wasted bandwidth. If I wanted something presenting low information to bandwidth then I'd go to a marketing consultant site.

You could only make it worse if you changed your tagline to "Providing a Solution to biting the hand that feeds IT"

[Anonymous Coward]

I like it

But then again I'm fucking mental.

[BadgerSam]

Yet another of my favourite websites has downgraded

What is it with so many websites recently changing to this stye of 'design'?

I have a decent sized monitor - I'd like to be able to have sites display across the width of the browser and not have to scroll so much. The really large images and fonts are a bit much too... you seem to be too focussed on tablet use by people who don't want to actually read much!?

I HATE these new design 'guidelines' that several of my favourite sites seem to have opted for, e.g. whathifi.com, pgatour.com, various Trinity Mirror-owned local news websites and now El Reg. Also The Guardian seems to be toying with a similarly annoying layout, which they are inconsistently trialling across their site. In all of the other cases, I don't visit those sites anywhere near as much as I used to as I want to be able to access information and read articles, not be bombarded with large images and text, and having to scroll for ages to see what's actually on each page! Oh, and I also miss the thumbnails for each story... El Reg, you're getting way too boring and corporate for my liking!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Yet another of my favourite websites has downgraded

"...you're getting way too boring and corporate for my liking!"

That's the only thing I disagree with.

The re-design has come close to breaking this site. I even registered today, just so I could post to these comments. For nearly a decade I've been content to simply read the stories and lurk down here in the entertaining depths, normally two or three times a day. *sigh*

And it's not just a case of change-o-phobia.

The new site hurts my eyes, and it's hard to read. Yesterday I would have cursed; today I want to cry. Others have said it better than I so I will content my self with up-votes for the moment.

[Sl1ck]

Goodbye!For!Now!

I've already posted once, and thought I'd visit back after 24 hours to see if I had acted the same impulsive way my 2 year old does when something happens she did not instigate..

I did not.

For now, it's goodbye Reg :-( The experience of visiting the site is visceral in nature. Sense and structure has been usurped by style - and poor style at that. We collectively come to the Reg for information, humour and a reality check on the industries that pay our way in life. It's a friend we can rely on. Or could.

I'll pop back in a week - hoping that things have changed for the better. It doesn't necessitate a reversal back to the old style - change it not a bad thing, we certainly rely on it in our professional lives in the IT sector, but it does need an approach to design that is inline with our needs.

TTFN

[Runner3001]

Looks a lot like all those cheeseball "news" sites clickbaiting all over Facebook, bad...very bad.

[trialanderr0r]

Cock-up > conspiracy

I'd been hoping throughout the day that we'd get the news that this was yet another El Reg wind-up/social experiment/general troll... certainly seeing the overwhelming sentiment of the comments...

Alas, the Update confirms the banal statistic: "cock-up" is always as more likely than "conspiracy" (or "satire", as I had sincerely hoped....")

[Anonymous Coward]

Too much whitespace (both within and without the main content structure) and your images are both enormous and at best tangentially related to the article. Fix that and you're probably golden. Couple of light grey lines, a more intuitive layout of the stories and cut the image size in half. Easy.

[Picky]

Abuse/inappropriate reason

+No way to give a reason why a post is abusive ...

[Vizesnyolcas]

Why mimic mobe screen on desktop?

Please reduce picture sizes - adults and chapter book readers do not need this dumb down screen space waster.

Please restore print article, it was one of the most useful feature.

[Dcope]

EWWWW

I know sites needs ads etc to function, and im not paranoid about being tracked but as soon as this site loaded (wonder if i can grab and permanent the chrome thumbnail), and ive got these huge ads either side of my screen im about 3 seconds away from installing AdBlock

[Shadow Systems]

Bring back the Print button!

I am Totally Blind. I use Jaws from Freedom Scientific, a Screen Reader Environment (SRE) that allows me to interact with what would normally be viewed if I had Sight.

The spread across multiple pages, constant reloading of repetitious elements (Navigation bars, menus, graphics, etc) wastes time, bandwidth, and resources that could be better geared towards handling the content.

Thus I use the Print Button Every. Single. Visit.

It removes the cruft & crap that slows down the SRE, it turns it all into a single, easily parsed/read unit, and only loads all the time-sucking elements Once.

Sure you Sighted Folks may be able to visually skim past the parts that are redundant, but with a SRE that's not a workable solution: since we can't see the bits to skip past them, we're forced to listen to the SRE announce Every. Single. One. Every. Single. Time.

Think about that a second. What might LOOK like a pretty line of icons & buttons and menu items to you, SOUNDS like absolute nonsense to anyone reliant on a SRE to read it to us.

Drag N' Drop elements we can't use at all (can't use a mouse because can't see to aim it), Drop Down Menu's that we can't use (no mouse means no OnMouseOver either), the pictures with names that mean fuck all ("IMG_123456789-192px-by-213px_Brbble.jpg" is not proper Alt Text & does nothing to let the SRE user know what it might be a link to), and all the other crap that makes it a PITA (PIT Ear?) for SRE users to navigate.

Obviously the color scheme means nothing to me, as do the font sizes, white spaces, and all the other Visual Only cruft that you've evidently inflicted upon your Sighted Visitors. But if I could, I'd probably be very busy right now cobbling up a personal CSS to override the crap you've foisted upon us.

So please bring back the Print Button & it's functionality. Those of us using a SRE to Access the site use it constantly, thus belying your claims that it's "never used & won't be missed".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Bring back the Print button!

An unexpected use case of print i