Please stop thrusting the "news" at me
It makes me feel uncomfortable.
Today's the day we flip the switch, and make our new homepage design live – with an opt-out for those still unsure of the layout. We've been gradually redeveloping the front page over the summer, and we will continue to do so, pushing out fixes, nudges, and features here and there. What you see today is not its final form, …
It is only somewhat less-reading-friendly than the one it is replacing.
The thing I like about arstechnica is they let people who want a tile view have one and they let people with better things to do than squinting at news sites all day have a list view they can easily scan down for headings indicating things they actually want to read.
I don't like change. Please, no. I don't like change.
But we're in IT. We're supposed to love change. I guess we should all go install Win10 if we haven't already.
Side note.. I miss the "hours" for post (posted X-hours or X-days ago). GMT Is not my cup of coffee/tea/adult beverage. I note that the articles "time" isn't in GMT... yet.
"I guess we should all go install Win10 if we haven't already."
I think most people don't install Windows 10. It comes pre-installed on most non Apple computers these days, or they upgraded from an earlier version of Windows, or the earlier version of Windows upgraded itself (even if you didn't want to), or they buy a Mac, or they install a proper operating system.
Side note.. I miss the "hours" for post (posted X-hours or X-days ago). GMT Is not my cup of coffee/tea/adult beverage. I note that the articles "time" isn't in GMT... yet.
Could you elaborate on where you're missing what, please? Email to webmaster@ if you fancy.
The date/timestamps in the HTML usually show the date/time in GMT, but there's some JS which runs and changes them over to relative time.
So if you're running JS, you should be seeing relative timestamps in most places (but some, as for example an article's "date line" isn't one of them) and any other "full" timestamp is meant to be displayed in GMT.
If you (are running JS and) aren't seeing a relative timestamp, or if a "full" timestamp doesn't look like isn't in GMT, that's a bug on my book, and I'd rather hear about it (at webmaster@ please!). Thanks!
MS went full on mobile first without developing a full set of widgets and ignoring the mouse. Responsive web design doesn't have to be binary but having the same HTML and using CSS (and some JS) for different screen sizes is how it's supposed to be done. Having less code to manage should mean fewer bugs…
Responsive can often be irritating.
For most sites I go the approach of having site content as XML.
Different XSL transforms produced mobile and large screen html
So same base content, the transforms give device tweaked html.
Lots of nice descriptive XML elements and attributes so your initial content can be documented in great detail.
Nicely fits model of content & presentation separation of concerns.
And change to content XML just means reapply XSL and both sites updated, nice & easy - plus it allows it all with no f****g JS required.
Too much white and too much empty space. Exactly how shit the BBC site looked when they made it to look better on mobiles. No care about those that use huge monitors due to stats saying a mobile users are a larger percent of viewers.
In this day and age it should be easy enough for technology to format on the fly better for mobile/large screens yet no one seems able to do it. Web 2 maybe not fit for purpose if it can't handle that.
My browser removes cookies that it hasn't blocked on exit, so im guessing every visit I will have to opt-out.
From using the BBC site daily I now use it once a month at best since they made the changes everyone hated. I guess im now going to have to find another way to view register content which isn't so dreadful or it will go the same way as the BBC in my viewing habits.
/Obligatory Rant
The BBC admitted to changing their staple of lots of information down to smaller byte sized generic sentences so they could fit on mobiles too. So even the stories got shit and more tabloid looking amongst all that white space.
The register shouldn't have that issue at least as stories are still a decent length.
In the past I have used the Stylish addon to change the look of sites/pages but that addon got pulled from both browsers app stores when an update started sending data back to their servers. Don't want to create security risks just to fix horrible formatting for a site.
"In the past I have used the Stylish addon to change the look of sites/pages but that addon got pulled from both browsers app stores when an update started sending data back to their servers."
"Page Colors & Fonts Buttons" has been working well for me for a long time. Shitty name, good addon.
The new front page looks ok but there are a couple of large empty spaces that should probably contain stories and the story tiles aren't a uniform size. As someone with a background in printing newspapers these issues make it look scruffy and untidy to me.
I'll be interested to try the compact mode, it sounds promising for mobile. Any chance you could work up a dark theme for my tired old dev eyes?
Reddit also allowed the old design to be used too when they made major changes recently. Link was prominent at the top too so easy to access.
There is am opt-out at the bottom of the register page, It might be hidden under a floating toolbar asking you to click OK to accepting cookies though, requiring you to click that before you can reach the opt-out link.
This.
There's too much white on the frontpage (and on the site in general). Let me choose a dark design and it's less likely to strain my eyes when I'm just barely woken up.
Not sure I like the borders on the tiles either. But again, might look better with a dark theme.
"One reason is to consolidate the desktop and mobile versions of the website into one design that responds to whatever size screen you're using."
It only shows four stories in a row no matter the screen size, and pads the sides with huge amounts of empty space. Far from responding to whatever screen size I'm using, it appears to simply be an entirely unresponsive mobile site that is unable to handle desktop browsers correctly.
"It responds to smaller screen sizes"
Not on my phone it doesn't, still 4 headlines to a row on that. If I change to request the mobile site then it gives a single column, but that's still clearly not responding to screen size, and certainly not consolidating anything.
Not on my phone it doesn't, still 4 headlines to a row on that. If I change to request the mobile site [...]
Correction: when you ask your browser to display it "as a desktop site" it shows you the 4 headlines; if you UNTICK the "desktop site" it goes back to being responsive.
On Chrome one can tick the "Desktop Site" box, which used to "just" remove the string "Mobile" from the user-agent string. This was useful as some websites were hell-bent on doing user-agent sniffing, and on serving "the mobile version" to user-agent strings which advertised themselves as "Mobile".
Unfortunately, that setting has been in recent times updated to also make it completely ignore the "viewport" meta tag altogether, which is what causes your mobile device to display the "full 1000px width" website in your small phone's viewport, and is what makes the website be unable to "be" responsive.
See also this commit which is where the "feature" (ach, thwwwp!) was introduced by them.
I'd recommend using Firefox instead, but it looks like they also decided to implement the same "feature", as can be evinced by this bug.
IMVHO, the setting should be split in two for "pretend to not be a mobile device" and "force site into desktop mode", but I digress.
Thus, in the two most popular mobile browsers I have access to, tapping "desktop mode" makes all the responsive work we've done moot, and it seems like it's "by design".
Personally, if I don't like what happens to a site when I click "desktop mode", I don't click "desktop mode" and get on with it. I personally prefer some sites in one way, and some in another. YMMV.
There's a chance that we may be able to "fix" the issue by adding some JS which looks at the device properties and alters some other properties to "kinda force in" the responsive mode, but I'd avoid doing that if I can't help it - as I'd rather the users were empowered with the ability to choose what happens to their device.
Which, in your case might mean you wouldn't want the "desktop mode" to be "on" for the homepage or, I guess, for article pages either, as they're also "responsive".
"Correction: when you ask your browser to display it "as a desktop site" it shows you the 4 headlines; if you UNTICK the "desktop site" it goes back to being responsive."
Correction - as I already pointed out, that is not what "responsive" means. If I use the desktop site, I get 4 headlines no matter how big I try to make it, regardless of what device is used. If I use the mobile site, I get a single column, again no matter what size I try to make it and regardless of what device is used. You can complain all you like about it being the browsers getting it all wrong, but the fact is that it was claimed the change was made so that only a single, unified site would work on all devices that automatically rescales to the appropriate size and layout, but what we actually have is exactly the same separate desktop and mobile sites each with a different, fixed layout. In other words, as I said to start with, it does not actually work.
For some reason it's there now. No idea what made it appear (yes, it's where previously definitely wasn't). Pointless though seeing as how I dump cookies after each session (because making it a permanent per-logged-in-user option is for losers amirite). I guess RSS it is, then. I just hope you count that as a "NOPE" vote too.
I almost always read The Reg on one of my iPads, e.g. the old one in the bathroom... On the new layout I have to do much more scrolling to see the same number of stories so I think it's a retrograde change. It's also at least as jerky because of the adverts. The old layout but with a quarter size top banner pic would have been my suggestion.
However this whole 'story' introduced me to the Weekly View which is *much* more to my liking, so thank you, have your pint!
"If you don't like the new design, for the time being you can click on the opt-out link at the bottom of the homepage – and bam, you're free."
Done.
I took a look at it when it was opt-in. The comments in the discussion were overwhelmingly against. IIRC they even said it made the mobile version worse so there goes the main reason for the change. But no, someone ?marketing, decides to go ahead anyway.
If I'd realised it was a WIP I'd have gone back and complained given feedback again. I guess that was the reaction of all the rest who didn't like it and when the feedback stopped you thought it was because we now approved.
I took a look at it when it was opt-in. The comments in the discussion were overwhelmingly against. IIRC they even said it made the mobile version worse so there goes the main reason for the change. But no, someone ?marketing, decides to go ahead anyway.
Come the Third Glorious UI Revolution where years of commentards calls for OS and website design which follow early 2000 design guides will finally heard and the sins of the Second Unholy UI Revolution (consolidated desktop and mobile versions) will be declared wicked and banished forever, this website will be weighed in the balance and found wanting unless it can find The One True Register Style in archive.org. But I digress.
Just to extend the quote and violently agree:
they can slot in these sorts of interesting elements as required on the day, and making it clear what's important to readers…
If you want to know what's important to me, ask me: don't try to tell me.
FWIW, what's important to me is all the stories, in chronological order.
I'm not a fan - the layout of stories doesn't appear to be uniform with gaps here there and everywhere.
Plus crying "waaah you don't like change" is exactly what other webdevs do as they remove usability and functionality from their websites, ala Facebook or Twitter. You're better than that El Reg!
If anyone's interested, this made most of the horribleness disappear:
.section_name
{
display: none;
}
.srow article
{
border: #000000 0px solid;
}
.standfirst
{
margin-bottom: 10px !important;
}
.story_grid_img
{
display: none !important;
}
PS: It'd be nice if every line in a comment wasn't given it's own P, or if you'd fix PRE in comments.
It seems to come as a surprise to certain people that mobile screens are a lot small than computer screens. Why on earth is it necessary to make page layout look the same?
You will be able to see less data on the mobile version so format it differently.
Trying to make it looks the same ends up with a metro like interface. Which everyone hated.
Incidentally I also hate the attempt to make everything look like web pages designed by extreme minimalists. A control panel is not a web page.
Since we're on the subject of making tweaks to the site design on El Rg, there is one change I beg you to make:
Many pages have a "You may also like" section, listing articles that are related in some way to the one I'm reading.
That's great, but please *please* **please** can you include the date that the linked article was published, because sometimes it pulls out articles that are really old or out of date, but doesn't give me any context that that's the case.
Thank you.
I'm not really too fussed about the new design but my GreaseMonkey scripts do a better job reformatting the old style than the new so I'll be opting for the old to save myself work for now.
I will raise a glass for allowing the opt-out, and "thanks" for the choice. But it's a little ominous that may only exist "for the time being", could disappear in the future.
Perhaps the more compact version will suit me even better. I guess we'll see.
You have not driven me away so that's at least a win. Though perhaps not everyone will feel the same way :-)
When the change was first tried I reached the conclusion that I was spending too much time on El Reg pages. There was no way I was going to revamp my clean up code to compact the new style.
Since then many half-completed projects have been progressed - without missing El Reg that much. When the new style becomes mandatory then I will be ready to be weaned off completely.
I just want to point out here that I very rarely go to the homepage of The Register, because I have the RSS feed configured in my firefox bookmarks toolbar, and I keep track of the news here and on a whole bunch of other sites by checking what's new in the feeds rather than by visiting any of the sites directly.
Maybe I'm in the minority in doing it that way these days, but it works for me and makes it really easy to keep track of new content across a few dozen sources of news and other info relevant to me.
I'm not 100% with the new design but from memory it seems better than the last time I looked. Whitespace and contrast remain a problem, especially when scanning the page. But sometimes you just have to press the button, and, as long as you continue to review feedback, and make improvements things will be fine. Moving to a single codebase will certainly help there.
Sorry, didn't see those.
The "contact us" page on the footer suggests e-mailing webmaster@ "for tech stuff" (and links to a page which explains what kind of information would be helpful to receive) as it's otherwise difficult to find all places where we might be mentioned.
I don't keep track of all forums, and sometimes forget to check old ones. I'm a commentard just like you.
There's a "web application firewall" in front of forums, and some content being submitted on forums "triggers it", somewhat heavily. It happens. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, I'll have a look at what we can do as soon as I can.
About the opt in/out being JS-based: sorry, we ensure that all of the basic functionality of the site can be used without JS, and then use JS to "better" that experience (see also: the up/downvote buttons, which work perfectly fine without JS but offer a nice AJAXy experience with JS enabled). The opt-out link isn't a "basic feature" of the site, at least according to my definition.
As the whole feature is JS based, its presence is also done using JS - in order to not have a half baked thing which would show a link and nothing would happen when it's clicked.
@ Marco Fontani
Re the Bug-Report... Glad to help!
Regarding the non-js opt-out option, Is it Friday the 13th???! Stop over-thinking / over-engineering this. Just auto-generate a 'B' content page at a 'B' address. Why is a formal 'opt out' needed? Oh well no worries, it kind-of exists already at this URL:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/Week/
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I come for the substance, not the style. Yes it has changed, but not that much so can't see what the fuss is all about. I think we're all rugged and jaded enough readers to not let this sort of thing affect us too much.
If I was part of some overly emotional and affectatious hipster group that believes that these sort of changes are "important" then I might be crying into my latte.
But I'm not. So I'm not.
I prefer the old homepage, for the simple reason that it sorts better - new stuff at the top, old stuff at the bottom. The new one seems confusing, a bit messy and really the sort of thing I'd be thinking about throwing away in favour of what's now the old homepage simply because the old homepage looks simpler, cleaner and more understandable.
And I think it's the squares, to be honest. The borders around each story make it look more cluttered, less friendly. It feels like you knew you had to make it reactive and then went a bit crazy with the wishlist.
Just my thoughts (and yes, I did opt in to the new homepage for a while before it became the default, this isn't just a kneejerk reaction...)
It looks a bit nicer than before. The behaviour on narrow screens is noticeably improved. I'm not sure what but something has improved in the way the front page layout handles titles with uneven lengths, and this version seems to be much less prone to putting strange big gaps on the page when someone's editor indulges their very-long-headline habit.
It looks similar enough to the previous design to still feel familiar, which is a big plus in my book. Thumbs up! :)
1. No stock photos, please. Only use photos if El Reg or the story source takes them. Consider providing an "opt-out" for all images on the front page (keeping them only in the full story, or shrinking them to icon-size).
2. No space wasted on white space: Use only the minimum needed to keep stories apart (one or two "emm"s should do, perhaps with a thin line).
Your real "value added" isn't just what you originate or gather (many do that), but how you share it, including both spin and snark. I work in an area about as far removed from IT as one can get, yet I continue to read El Reg for the 10% of stories that matter to me directly, and the simple delight of reading the El Reg presentation of the other 90%.
In particular, I think El Reg should revive and expand its space program.
More images. Less text.
Then bemoan the lack of reading skills and habits.
A supplier's site, that I use, changed over to six items per page with large images and minimal text. Takes six pages to get through the over 30 items under a major category with no search box.
Feckin' useless.
Then there's the bandwidth required to load the front page.
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You have got a responsive design which is great, but WHY have you got a max width of 1000px on the BODY, responsive means it can support small screens AND big screens. I have a good sized desktop monitor. There is no good reason why your pages shouldn't be in the region of 1400 -> 1600 pix at least. I can mostly see grey space on the sides of your page.
I've been using the "text-tastic" version of El Reg for some time now.
(and any other site that supports it)
uMatrix blocks everything except for two css connections from El Reg and the occassional persistent cookie to post a rant. (which is purged soon after)
After reading all the Reg's articles about the plethora of nasty browser exploits I have taken precautions.
I do however appreciate the fact that your site is one of the few that still functions when JavaScript, images, Google's fonts and the rest are blocked.
I've seen some dodgy websites that refuse to load if javascript and/or cookies are blocked. (Microsoft for one)
Front page seems rather disorganised. Differently formatted sections.
Can we not just see a chronological list of stories?
In the morning, I just scroll down the stories looking for something interesting and during the day I do a fresh to see what's new that has turned up.
The front page seems to be dominated by extremely large pictures still. Most of your readers are not interested in clip art. We can use Google for that.
I don't really give a shit about what other people think is popular. They're probably not interested in what I'm interested in. It never seems to contain articles that are interesting to me, so it's a waste of space.
This morning I looked at the website on my phone and although it's OK, each story takes a lot of space, resulting in less content per page. I think the border seems rather superfluous and wastes a lot of space. Again, not really interested in looking at quirky pictures. I come here for the news.
This was one of my major dislikes with the original home page design. If I were you I would try the weekly summary. A chronological list of stories so you only have to scroll in one direction and not figure out which pieces of the page go where (or even discover that the same article appears more than one because it falls into several categories).
"or even discover that the same article appears more than one because it falls into several categories"
I've noticed something odd about the RSS feed, some articles appear in it twice, coz they edited the title. Usually right next to each other, like it was changed quickly. Most of the time it's a rather inconsequential change. For example (both published on 2018-09-13 05:26) -
Whiskey business - DDoS attack leaves University of Edinburgh server Irn-Scru'd
Whisky business: Uni of Edinburgh servers Irn-Scru'd by cyber-attack
I've noticed something odd about the RSS feed, some articles appear in it twice, coz they edited the title.
That seems to happen when the _url_ is changed, as the RSS feeds' "id" field is for some reason set to the path part of the story's URL, which changes if the story URL changes (which happens).
It seems like we should migrate to using an unique "id" instead, but we need to do that from a certain point going forward or we risk all RSS readers seeing all stories as being "new".
Thanks for the bug report, I'll add it to our pile and see what can be done about it.
It's almost like we should have a way to isolate the content of the news articles from the design.
And then mark upgrades to the formatting / layout as a particular version people can look at.
And then people can choose how they want the page to look without at all affecting the way the content is produced and handled on the backend.
And thus letting people choose whether they want the old Reg fixed-width thing, or the shiny-new, or the shiny-new-that-we-broke-but-we'll-fix-it-later.
And then, maybe, we could come up with a catchy name for those formatting layouts. Like...
Themes.
SERIOUSLY. Stop faffing with the website doing things that instantly alienate 50% of people, and instead focus on the content and making the site work and have useful features (like searching through my old posts, etc.).
Then let your designers run riot on a theme. And then you can change what the DEFAULT theme is to your heart's content. And we can still view The Reg as if it were a site to convey news and not have GIGANTIC side-bars on it, or unnecessarily large "highlighted" stories when we just want to view them all as a list.
It's not as good as the original design, so I'll stick to that while it's available.
I think my main disappointment (or source of "meh") about the new design is that it has less of the El Reg personality than the old one. The new one just looks generic -- much like lots of other websites that have redesigned in the last few years.
The changes aren't massive, and I slightly like it better as a picture can help decide if an article is relevant to my interests, though that leads to a bigger problem as Reg hasn't been all that big on relevant pictures. That also kinda makes the entire page look like "sponsored" material.
I've been using the weekly summary since it was made available. To date, none of the front page redesigns has made more sense to me, from a user/reader perspective.
Don't get me wrong, I've TRIED the frontpage, both with and without advertising. I've even tried to like it, in it's various iterations. But I always return to the simple, uncluttered week at a glance. Please don't get rid of this option.
You could, however, streamline "Week" further: Get rid of the "Most Read" thingie. Try as I might, I can see no real reason for that option on that particular page.
Its now far too difficult to find any useful content.
Pictures are meaningless and now there are far more of them. If you need pictures, make them relevant to the story, not just something to break up the words. I can read more than 10 words without getting bored.
When browsing from a 4K screen and get very little content, its all whitespace, pictures and headings. The whitespace might be because I block all the adverts and other cruft from the old site.
Whats wrong with providing good content - its a tech site, we expect tech, not pictures unrelated to tech.
I can live with it. The Kshiny is at a manageable level, and at this point, it doesn't look like an ADHD-addled Millennial designed it, so good on you for that. I do hate change for change sake, and the whole concept of designing for a handheld that will also "work" for a 3-screen desktop installation is anathema to me, at least. But you didn't bugger it up completely, so... we'll give it a longer look-see for now.
Every time I visited the site on mobile I had to squint a bit and then do a pinchy-zoom and shake my phone vigourously towards the sky cursing the tech gods.
But now, I can relax. You made things responsive. What took you so long?! (That was a rhetorical question - don't you dare answer it!)
The new format works fine on my fondle slab, my phone and my desktop. Better even than before on the hand helds.
All that white space people are complaining about? I just assume it is space for ads that I don't see and never have seen. I just ignore it, by assuming it probably has some purpose for something by somebody. Otherwise it wouldn't be there. My curiosity doesn't even care.
I got used to the last change. This one doesn't need getting used to.
that it adapts (responds) to the device and viewport you're using? So the whitespace tends to say it's not been done thoroughly.
But to be honest, till it was pointed out in the thread, I didn't notice. However I access the stories via the RSS feed so rarely see the homepage.
But I ... quite like it, ghod rest my sole... (the left one).
Too many images for story headlines. Especially when the vast majority are library images that don't relate directly to the story. More than three stories across the page sounded like it would mean more information on the page and less scrolling required. All the extra images have negated that benefit. It's has shades of Intel/AMD making faster CPUs only for MS to bloat Windows up even more to negate the speed increases.
Can't wait for the compact version of the site.
I still fucking hate it (reading on a 1024x600 netbook at the moment, but I doubt that filling up the page with a single column and pictures on each item will make me hate it any less), and after going back to the index page but failing to find an option to revert which is claimed to be at the bottom of the page, all I can say is that I'll only be reading the site irregularly.
Total fail.
I understand you want to maintain a single code base. However, the mobile m.theregister page is single column - which is good, yet still retains the boxes - which is unnecessary. The vertical lines serve absolutely no purpose except to take up space. The huge space caused by the twin horizontal lines (one per box) between articles takes up even more space. This is bloody annoying when scrolling down the page.
Overall looks pretty good, although there seem to be some weird bits in the layout where only 3 news items appear in a row that's supposed to have 4. Glad you still went with a traditional layout rather than one of thos daft shiny designs that push half the content off the page and mean more scrolling to see anything (actually it looks like this layout allows more tiles per screen than the old one)
Seems i'm just adding a murmur to the din but I would also like less pointless white space and less unnecessary (and rather repetitive use of) pictures please. Will be very interested in seeing compact mode. Oh and if its the framework of your new design that 'insists' on all that white space please dont blame it - kill it with fire and find something better.
That said of all the site redesigns i've seen this one is better than most (despite the low bar). Here's hoping they actually listen to our comments
I kvetched a little about the last reformatting and this makes one of my complaints worse - even more white space shining into the echoing void of my workplace - but really, it doesn't get in the way of reading the content so it's not a problem.
If you want to delight me, get rid of the float-over ads.
If you want to really piss people off, go full-on late 90s Gociities with a floral border and an autoplay .wav of something plinky-plonky.
Sadly we all know that whatever we say, realistically, nothing will change.
This change? Hate it with a passion - as been said, too many stock pictures, too much whitespace, and why put the classification and reporter on the "listing" - especially making so much of it.
WE ARE TECHIES - WE WANT INFORMATION, EFFICIENTLY.
I think it was wasted cash and cannot WAIT for text only/text rich version to come along.
'why put the classification and reporter on the "listing"'
'WE ARE TECHIES - WE WANT INFORMATION, EFFICIENTLY.'
One of the problems is we are asking for different things. Go back over the comments in all three articles on this current change, and you'll find people asking for the classification and reporter that you are wondering why it's there, and some asking for that info to not be there.
One way of making all of us techies happy might be to provide a public API, we can write our own queries to present the info in which ever way we like. Now THAT might be innovation in a tech news site, the user editable profile might include -
First name
Last name
Forum user name
Front page SQL
Front page HTML template
Forums SQL
Forums HTML template
It appears that when you are really proud of an article you can end up listing it 4 times... today I see, "Microsoft accidentally let encrypted Windows 10 out into the world" in "Top Stories," "Don't Miss," "Latest News" and, perhaps understandably with all that coverage, also in "Most Read!"
I'll stick with the mobile version and avoid the grief.
The relevance of the ads I'm getting when browsing on a work PC with no adblocker - Argos (cos I bought a watch a month ago), music store (cos I bought a keyboard last week), occasional tech stuff I have no interest in and at least four sites catering for teenage girls fashion WTF? I've never had the urge to look at teenage dresses (not online anyway).
"I've never had the urge to look at teenage dresses (not online anyway)."
The major ad-slingers (and Google is the best at this) track you offline as well as online. They know when you buy something with a credit card in a brick and mortar store, for example, and increasingly have data-sharing deals with stores that do in-store tracking.
Don't think that the ad-slingers don't know about those teenage dresses you buy just because you paid cash in a brick-and-mortar store.
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I've just got very annoyed by something, but it immediately stopped happening, so I applaud you for the level of behavioural insight you have built into your pages, though I suspect it wasn't intentional!
Browsing on a desktop with a landscape screen, the most prominent news items at the top of the home page remained anchored in position when scrolling down the page. This is particularly tedious as the DK-inspired surfeit of white space already reduces the amount of screen estate available for actually seeing content: there's no need to put even more of it out of my control. However, having found this page to report my annoyance, I can't make it happen again. So, hope it was just a one-off!
Style is subjective. I am not a fan of change but some things grow on you and others are not important.
Content however is everything. The new design loses the thumbnail when I mouse over the banner headings. I used to mouse over "software" for example and see the latest articles in brief. No longer. Even if I click on the new "Software" I just get another set of headings. No content.
I am not enticed to read so El Reg gets fewer clicks and less advertising income.
It's your choice if you want to make your site less attractive to readers and advertisers alike but I think it is a dumb move.
I hope you keep the old design running in parallel long enough to realise your mistake.