The Shock of the New: The Register redesign update 4 Readers, thanks for all the feedback. Here's a list of tweaks we rolled out today. 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 …
Remember the day RayBans used to come with a UV filtering certificate? They don't any more so won't help much with the new dazzling Reg layout.
They're all dodgy since B&L sold the brand-name to an Italian fashion house manufacturer who now make all the bling-name sunglasses. Have tried them and they just aren't optically correct any more.
Actually, there is a need for the print link.
The print link isn't just to print the page. It also shows multi-page articles condensed into one page.
Handy for lots of things besides printing - like reading an article without having to flip pages and wait for the next to load and render with all the !§$$§"$%$& pictures.
You can add /print.html to the end of any article address to get the print page, so the support is still there. All that needs to be done is to replace the idiotic "social media" button with a button that does something useful.
For those of us whom are Totally Blind & using a Screen Reader Environment (SRE), the page that results from clicking the Print link is Accessible as far as the DDA is concerned. The SRE can read it without puking, and since all the images (which I can't see anyway) and back end code only has to be loaded once, the SRE can actually do it's job. Merely telling my computer to print the page does nothing to render the page Accessible, and since I don't have a printer, all a Control+P does is throw up an error box to install a printer first.
(What good is a printer to a blind person? We can't tell if it printed anything, can't see if the ink is going bad, and for all we know the printer is spitting out blank pages as it silently laughs at us. Printers are for folks whom can see to verify that anything got printed at all. And even if it DOES print, what am I supposed to do with it now? I can't see it to READ it either.)
So I'll UpVote you for being silly, but also make this reply to point out that there was a valid legal & technical reason for the return of the Print link. Cheers!
"What good is a printer to a blind person? We can't tell if it printed anything, can't see if the ink is going bad, and for all we know the printer is spitting out blank pages as it silently laughs at us."
I hope you are successful in getting The Register to restore the Print page link.
Does your screen reader recognise the 'skip to content' link at the top of each page? That link is set so as to be invisible to those using a visual brower by using a style sheet property, but is supposed to be recognised by screen readers and text-only browsers.
PS: I teach in a College in the UK. About 15 years ago I had a blind Braille reading student show up on a course. I was able to access a braille printer and a tactile image printer for providing him with lesson notes at a (very) local University. I changed the set textbook that year to one that the RNIB had available in Braille. It worked for him... perhaps try a local University should you want hard copy to refer to generally?
I was wondering the same thing, too. Some guesses:
* El Reg only operates in powers of 2...
* Like Microsoft's OS versions, every other one is so awful that it should better remain unmentioned...
* Like Intel's tick-tock, a bona fide update consists of two steps, of which the first one is merely shrinking of the headline font...
* They were going to Interview Update 3 designers and then they were planning to assassinate them, but North Korea objected...
The visited links color makes my day! Thanks to have put that back to high contrast. It was difficult to see the difference on a LCD screen (who still own a CRT anyway?) for someone with normal vision. Imagine for someone with even a slight level of vision impairment like daltonism (color blindness) or with lower contrast sensitivity.
Regards
Much lighter on the eyes with the outer border being grey - (see caveat below)
Nice to see the visited contrast -- I've relied on that in the past since I rarely note the headline -
Framing lines are better - but could still be darker - again - thats me.
I still like the idea of the subhead background being a slightly offset shade -- it will help with the overall "whiteness".
The font size change on the hero pic is good but personally I still find the image too large. I get that mucking it down much farther will play hell with the overall layup of top of column, but I really really really do think it can shrink a bit... perhaps stuffing the subhead for the top article into column 3 of the header in finer print???? dunno - but thats just a thought.
The banner -- the christmas one is *much* easier on the eyes. Please keep this in mind, that large swath of red was a bit much for me - please also consider .... something ... to break up that large block of red with nothing but the title to break it up - black trim on the lettering or the vulture? dunno - but its a mite too much on its own.
Forward progress is good progress -- please keep working on things.
Beer 'cause yer workin on the last friday before christmas, and you don't have a chocolate and candycane icon
But why the ridiculously oversized full-screen pictures at the top of every article? When I click a link I want to start reading, not have to page down first before I reach the text. It's a benefit to you as well in not wasting time looking for vaguely-relevant images, so you can concentrate on the writing.
Come on, people, put a bit more thought into usability instead of pointless glitz...
Well, it is an improvement. Having the read links red is a sensible move. They grey sidebars are less obnoxious but I would still prefer they were used for something useful. If I maximise the web browser when displaying the register I end up with a 2x3 application window inside of a 16x10 screen. Not a sensible use of real estate.
Keep going, another couple of weeks and you may be back to something almost as good as what you started with. Meanwhile I'll stay with www.thregister.co.uk/Week because I still can't stand the homepage layout.
We're getting there.
The giant picture and vast font of the headliner is still a pain if you are looking for new stories from your Opera Speed Dial or other browser equivalent, because the headline story is all you get.
The way the headlines are done in each of the categories is much better. Yes, it is pretty much how it was before, but that worked.
Probably very much a long shot, but since we have to log in to comment, would it be possible to include some settings in the user profile so we can select how The Register looks for ourselves?
This would also give you feedback.
That immovable thing at the top that says
``[vulture] DATA CENTER SOFTWARE [...] WEEKEND EDITION''.The width is limited by the sidebars, and now I can't have the full height of the screen, either. I can find my way to the top of the page in numerous ways, none of them requiring a fixed area waiting to attack should I push my cursor out of the way, and end up there by accident. (Admittedly, the delay is a help if you're just passing through, but I'd like to see the whole thing go away.)
Maybe it's time to learn to do site-specific CSS. :-(
I see you've got ads in the blank space to the sides. That's good, so long as you drop the ad above the masthead and in the articles.
I also see that you've removed the useless pictures from some of the articles.
Woo, hoo. Progress.
Now nail the menu to the top of the page, get rid of the ginormous picture in the top tease, make all of the article_img pictures either small or get rid of them, and we can be happy.
This post has been deleted by its author
Thank you, now when I click an article that interests me I'm straight into the content (and it's less obvious I'm not working :-) It was getting ridiculous, if the article had photos one would be duplicated at the top of the page so no value was added.
Thank you also for the grey background, much easier on the eyes.
I'd add my vote for 4 columns, though BBC News and The Onion seem to use the same width as New-Reg
Why not ask first, I am sure there are folks here who are more than capable of reworking the site, we could have a poll on the member submitted site versions :)
Edit, lets expand on that idea and have an open source option, Vulture submitted content in an easy form for member sourced wrappers to use :)
(Very occasional commenter, please be gentle... oh, what the heck, this is El Reg!)
Usual viewing environment: 24" 18:9 LCD. Every vertical pixel is precious!
Update 4's a considerable improvement on previous iterations - thanks to the design team, and a special thanks for making it possible to miss out the huge information-poor stock photos on the tops of stories!
As others have noted, I'd prefer a more information-dense front page. A typical old-school techie who grew up on green screens (once punched cards went away), I read very quickly (ALL CAPS less so) and it takes time to shift my brain between text and images, or even between significantly different text sizes. The current version gives me very little of what I want (text that I can process quickly to decide whether I want to view more detail), especially on a landscape screen.
I'd love to see the floating menu bar pinned back to the top of the page. As noted above, every vertical pixel's precious to me. Add in the design truism that ALL CAPS is harder to read at speed (check out the developer loathing of Visual Studio 2012 menus on Windows 8 if you think the vitriol here was bad) and my comment that I have to do a mental gear shift to read different text sizes, and you get the irritating situation that I've just lost some of the most scarce resource on my screen to something that I don't use and can't read.
All that said, *thank you* for continuing to iterate after release, and for being willing to take comments at all. A technical audience is one of the hardest to design for - there are many reasons for this, not all reflecting well on the audience - and rarely pulls punches on feedback.
"every vertical pixel's precious to me."
And to me, upvoted for that specific comment. With the almost ubiquitous use of widescreen monitors, whether that be desktop, laptop or tablets/phones in landscape mode, building a site that "steals" vertical resolution while enforcing a reletively narrow horizontal width is just so old fashioned and 20th century. Especially since 720, 768 and 1080 seems to be the "standard" for most screens.
On the other hand, massively wide pages aimed at swipey touch screens where everything is a side-swipe away is equally as bad!
Perhaps I am feeling my age but why did you feel this demand to change anything. I had no problems and now I have this feeling I have t click more than before. A sort of an Firefox feeling for no reason at all. And I know I will accept it but still I feel Google has done it right in not altering anything at sign on while again making gmail more and more stupid.
When reducing the page zoom (using control mouse wheel), the page text gets smaller but the header (DATA CENTRE SOFTWARE etc) doesn't.
End result is that WEEKEND EDITION wraps on to the next line and is overlaid on page content, often making it impossible to read.
Please fix.
"When reducing the page zoom (using control mouse wheel), the page text gets smaller but the header (DATA CENTRE SOFTWARE etc) doesn't.
Please fix."
Either it's been fixed or it's a browser/OS specific problem. Firefox 34 on XUbunto 12.04 here and the menu bar scales on ctrl-scroll for me.
I'm using Firefox 34.0.5 on linux.
I concede that the fonts now change in sync with the page zoom. However, the wrap around still forces "WEEKEND EDITION" to show on the next line. Zooming to any size (greater or less than 100%) makes no difference to this symptom.
Additionally, when opeing a comments page (like this one), the right hand column is missing until I scroll down far enough for the "DATA CENTRE" header bar to be at the top of the screen, when the right hand column suddenly appears and the comments are shifted left.
I've tried disabling Noscript and Adblock without success. Similarly, starting Firefox in safemode makes no difference.
Am I alone in finding that I visit and read far fewer stories than in the past?
For whatever reason this new look just doesn't draw me in, and I'm finding that I'm just not enticed to scroll down through all of the great swaths of white space.
In other words, because I can see only four stories in their entirety when I visit, I don't tend to look any further. More stories visible without scrolling = more pages visited.
I'd love to see how visitor metrics have changed.
Agreed! I know I'm reading less content. The layout of the front page really angries up my blood. I hate the "Don't Miss" positioning on the left of the page. It disrupts the natural tracking of my eyes, and I go back to the top and try again, and then stop reading. Either use the whole row for "Don't Miss" or remove it. Three headlines could reside there instead of one, the "Don't Miss" headline doesn't count as it is a regular story somewhere on the page.
The headlines also seem weaker, not as enticing.
I'd find it very useful if on the front page you could revert to the time posted for each story, not elapsed time since posting. I read ElReg on various computers and know roughly when I last looked but with elapsed time I have to work it out and wonder do you round it up or down to the nearest hour.
I like the fact that stories now have posting time as well as date.
the blue/green/grey link for the category and the story type above and below the articles take on a psychedelic appearance when scrolling on my macbook air 13"(non retina). I've also noticed some weird text colorations related to spacing of the text.
No sign of the most comment tab.
Bin the drop down photo's connected with each category at the top. Unless you're going to fill them with "interesting" content, and in that case shrink the size a bit, and put the dropdown delay to 1.5 seconds. The dropdowns obscure some links.
Thanks for the changes already made, the grey sidebars help.
"Top Art in stories - now editorially selectable"
Clear the message hasn't got through to enough editors. I tried removing the block on images from regmedia but quickly reimposed it; overall the site's better without any images than it is with these almost entirely irrelevant clonkers hiding the top of the stories.
Any chance of knocking all the fonts on the front page down by 2 or 4 points each? I rarely, if ever feel the need to scale a page manually at my end, but I find the front page of El Reg works better with two clicks of Ctrl-Scroll Down. In the case of articles, one Ctrl-ScrlDn is about right.
For reference, 15" laptop, 1024x768
When using my laptop (1366 x 768) or desktop (1080), I don't spend much time looking at the menu other than to right click items and open in another tab - otherwise I read the 'm' version.
Too much white space on the front page, it could be more compact.
What is it with the images at the top of articles? Why are they so big?
Some of the images are not even relevant - Windows Server 2003 article has a pig.
Why are they there at all if not relevant?
The Christmas banner at the top has a white gap above it. Why?
Otherwise, well, it is the content that matters mostly, so keep keep working.
I've created a user CSS which restores some sanity to El Reg, there's well over 25 tweaks! Its currently aimed at FireFox but should be easily adaptable to other browsers that support user CSS overrides. You can find the code, a list of the main 25 changes and some screenshots over on the Reg Redesign forum thread (its currently on page 21(!)... For the moment!)
You can thank me later... Although I'm Almost certain the folks at El Reg won't! Lol
Yes, alright then Shades, thanks. Or a limited thanks anyway. The Adblock filters and previous userContent.css did much the same. In the longer term I would prefer the style sheet fix; except that when I disable it all New Years Day, if I find that massive image still there, I'll take that as a statement of the site owner's true regard for the readership and remove my Reg bookmarks, cookie and NoScript permissions and move on.
The menu bar is a mess for me. It takes more than one line, which means it spills over onto a second line, which is overlayed onto whatever the text is:
http://tinypic.com/r/igvp74/8
On comment threads, the whole content column moves to the right to avoid it:
http://i60.tinypic.com/5lq4y9.png
until I scroll down, when all the content pops to the left:
http://i61.tinypic.com/jpua8l.png
It's very annoying to have the content jumping about as I scroll up and down.
I've enlarged some of my browser fonts to make them more readable (it's a 15" retina Macbook at 2048x1280 so native is a bit small, I've set it to smallest being 17pt), but I thought CSS was supposed to deal with getting the layout right?
The laptop I normally use has a 3200 x 1800 screen. And this new layout only uses a narrow strip down the middle - less than half the screen. PLEASE design the layouts so that they make good use of whatever screen resolutions (and font sizes) people want to use.
The new layout is - for me - much worse that than the previous one. Much less info per screen.
The simplest thing here is to make the text proportional instead of absolute. It was silly before, it's silly now. We have bigger screens, let us make use of them.
On a different tack, why not have the facility of duckduckgo and allow for changes in background and foreground, Even if you did take the sensible route of proportional columns, it would still be welcome.
But big pictures taking up most of the first page of a story are still annoying, as is the large text.
"I realise visited links appear in red but they still do and I thought that was a feature of the users browser."
The HTML/browser default is blue for unvisited links, purple for visited links IIRC (it's years since I saw a "naked" web page) and underlined for when the mouse hovers over the links.
On the Reg initial re-design the links were black for unvisited, dark grey for visited and red for mouse hovering over a link. Swapping the red mouse hover and the dark grey visited colours is the single biggest improvement over that original re-design.
I now 'get' what it was about the old design that drew me in and made me want to waste my time here: It felt like opening a crude tabloid! BUT! A crude tabloid with vast treasures of knowledgeable people, real knowledge, all flung about with devil may care snarkifaction that belied the impression. The wall of cleverisms, headlines, could be appreciated in a scanning glance and made one want to go, "Oooh, that one and that one and that one too."
Then the league of commentards would have at it and supplement the main articles oh so wantonly that a semi smile never left my face as I read.
Now? The site is like a myriad of others and doesn't feel like it bites anything at all anymore.
It really was better before. You revelled in your difference and it was merely difference for difference's sake. No, it was different because it was smarter. The front page had IMPACT. It grated a bit but that what the fuck do want if your mascot is a bloody vulture?
Gee whiz, guys. :(
Congratulations on many of the adjustments, and thanks for taking the time to listen to people and being flexible.
The only two things I'd ask for is a reduction of the top graphic; it is causing me too much scroll. My personal option would be to reduce it to a quarter of its size and have the text to the right, instead of underneath it.
Also, the name of the author, even if it is in the same small blue font as the "segment" in the article header please.
Thumbs up for taking feedback on board and listening to people.
As far as Jaws is concerned, there are No Such Accessibility Links. The words "Print", "Accessibility", and "Content" do not appear on this page, or if they do they are not links.
Thus I am forced to manually add "Print.Html" to the end of every URL, because it doesn't appear that the site's designers Give A Fuck about their blatant disreguard for the DDA.
As for the Braille printers, I am aware of them & have seen them used (back when I could still see), but due to other health issues (Insulin Dependant Diabetic) I don't have the tactile sensitivity needed to read Braille. (Multiple daily finger pokes for blood sugar tests plays merry hell with one's ability to feel the tiny bumps.)
But yes, if I could read Braille, I'd have a BrailleWriter printer & be able to read my own print outs. =-)
See that image at the top of the home page; and it's an image that is too big; and everyone comments to that effect; and they suspect that because it's a most glaring image that management will refuse to back-track as a matter of principle; and people say with this one point the site has descended into farce?
Thankyou for forcing your latest set of mind-bogglingly stupid changes down our throats.
Without them I would never have been motivated to set up my own user.css for this place, that has transformed it from:
an amateurish "I just discovered clip-art and big fonts" 1990s, My First Web Page; repetitious, glaring, jarring, repetitious, look-we're hip and down with the kids, repetitious, nauseatingly dumbed-down tabloid, cluttered mess;
into a simple, clear, one-page reverse chronological, see what's new and what I've already seen, unencumbered by: your puerile attempts to ram stuff I've already ignored down my throat; or vacuously unrelated and over-sized pictures that tell me nothing extra and just consume screen and mind-space.
Thankyou for forcing me to sit up straight and do something about it.
/* Copyright 2014 Situation Publishing Ltd. http://www.theregister.co.uk/ */
.static { display:none; }
.large_story { display:none; }
.story_list { display:none; }
.dont_miss { display:none; }
.dont_miss_row { display:none; }
.story_grid_img { display:none; }
.article_img { display:none; }
.forums {width:90%; }
.adu { display:none; }
.wptl { display:none; }
#tips_or_corrections { display:none; }
#article_body_btm { display:none; }
#right-col { display: none; }
#boot { display:none; }
#read_more_on { display:none; }
#whitepapers { display:none }
#body .CaptionedImage.Center { float:none; }
#body .CaptionedImage.Float.Right{float:none;margin:0 0 1em 1em}
#top_tease { display:none; }
#hot { display:none; }
#right_col { display:none; }
#spotlight { display:none; }
#sponlinks { display:none; }
#crumb_trail { display:none; }
#RegCCO { display:none; }
#social_btns { display:none; }
#follow_btns_top { display:none; }
#footer { display:none }
#story_rhs_more { display:none; }
#topbar { display:none; }
a:visited { color: green; font-size: 85% }
Perfect!
This new version is better than the first version but still not as good as it was before the redesign. Can we have a clear explanation of why we can't just go back? What was the reason for the change - was there feedback that said that it should change? If not, who insisted it must and why?
Basically, every comment has been to change things back to the way they were but instead of rolling back, you have instead altered only parts to more closely resemble the look and behaviour of the old site. Why not just ditch the new version altogether?
This is something I will never understand - the apparent need to keep changing things just for the sake of it. I always hear words like "clean" and "fresh" and "streamlined" but the big problem is that nearly EVERY redesign using those catch-words as descriptors ends up with a far lower information density.
Designers call it "uncluttered" but what they really mean is "less information". That's because "clutter" is not about the amount of stuff but how it is arranged. Such people inherently think that having less on the page is better but this is a news site, not an advertisement. Having lots of white space can make for a very neat and elegant wedding invitation or a clear and powerful advertisement but when you want to be able to flit from story to story on a website and see what's going on, white space is wasted space.
What you need to remember in the future is that a website design is supposed to match the audience and the purpose of the site so you can't just take words like "clean" as universally desirable. This is a tech news site - give us a layout rich in information over one that is "fresh" any day.
On a specific note, I might be the only one but I liked the left nav bar, if for no other reason than it was easier for my eyes to follow the text in an article that way (i.e. indented by a few inches).
This is a TECH NEWS site. We are not bleating sheeple flocking to singing dancing websites with BIIIIG PICTURES for the reading-challenged.
Fire your marketing types or whomever decided that:
A. A perfectly good website needed to be mucked about with because change is good even if it SUCKS.
B. Created and approved the changes made. They are horrible, and please only fluffy marketing types who try to justify their jobs by changing that which does not need it. How many weeks of reader spleen do you need to face the bleeding obvious?
Oh, and SINGLE PAGE OPTION!!!
18 days and you STILL have the over sized, useless fucking images on the front page and in the articles. Even worse, the images are still only sometimes part of the story.
Seriously, you've got a stock Earth image at the top of this article, when the article itself is about the pictures Alexander Gerst took from space. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/28/earth_timelapse_video_blue_dot/
Seriously? All you could come up with for that article was a stock photo? Couldn't even take a few minutes to take a still out of the video? Just "Oh, space, slap a stock photo on it, no one cares anyway?"
I see you also still have the retarded banner ad above the register header on the front page.
Well, I'm sorry. So long as your page is so damned ugly, retarded, and useless, I will continue using ad-block to reformat the site into something close to useful. That means you get no ad revenue, but hey, you had to have your redesign. You'll just have to live with the side effects.
No, not trying to provoke a 'boi-fight.
Yesterday I clean installed the Mint KDE release candidate. Downloaded Pale Moon 64, installed my add-ons, themes, bookmarks, search engines, set it up the way I like it e.g., BrowserTabsCloseButton = 0 etc. Then went to El Rog (not El Reg any more but we are getting a rogering). Lawks a lordy the top image was a reasonable size! The full text of the top three article teasers was visible!
So, booted Windows. Removed the Chrome folder. Opened Adblock's filter preferences and disabled the custom filters. Clicked the register home page bookmark and Lo! the top image took 90%+ of the screen. No change. Fine in Linux, crap in Windows.
Designed by a 'boi, was it?
It went from being a clean, easily parsed by my Screen Reader Environment, to being filled with all the bloat that turns it into an unreadable cluster fuck.
Instead of the Title, a blank line, the original URL, and then the content, now I've got all the bullshit like a Search function & Social Media crap to wade through first, and you break the article with the "related content" that belongs AFTER the fucking article, not in the bloody MIDDLE of it.
Fuck you & the Design Team.
I hope your readership numbers flush themselves down the toilet & the ad revenue implodes as further proof of the absolute, mind boggling, infinitely fucked in the head with a double decker BUS, Epic Fuck Up that you've turned the site into.
I hope a EU Blind Citizen invokes the DDA to sue the fucking pants off you arseholes, bends you over a table, & JACK KNIFES that bus up your ass.
It might be a tight fit, what with your HEADS already being wedged up in there so firmly.
*Infinitely Rude Gesture*
Q: Why haven't the commentards been bitching about the content and appearance of the articles?
A: Because there's so many errors on the title page that no one actually looks at th articles.
The links for the "Don't Miss" blocks on the title page still don't change colors to show I've visited them.
Guys,
Just give up already and revert back to the design that worked.
Late in the game I've discovered the glory of the Reg mobile site - WOW!
Lots of text, little pictures NO ADVERTISING OF ANY SORT, and fast to scan and read headlines.
Essentially, all of the things that are annoying about the new Reg disappear as if by magic.
And all of the things that were annoying about the old site for that matter.
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