it definitely looks more elegant

at last, dates/times for your posts!  (Looks good btw.)

Mike

Hi Rafat & Team,
Congratulations, the site looks pretty organized now. Being on software side, I can echo your comments about blog CMS/general CMS. Though in Java world content repository specifications are evolving to make solutions vendor interoperable but I don’t know if such spec exists solutions with other language. Having said that, I see no reason why blogging software should not aim to have a common spec for “managing content repository” vendor neutral way!!

All the best, btw in new website top header having paidContent.org family menu, it says “published in Santa Monica....”, shouldn’t be it “Published in New Delhi...” for ContentSutra?

Hey Santosh
Thanks on your thoughts..yes, we will change it on ContentSutra..thanks for pointing out.

“Some credits are in order: first, the excellent design and development team at Airbag Industries and the allied team.”

Well, a development team that can’t get a site to work before launching it (three days last weekend) and still is working bugs out in a “live” not “production” environment, doesn’t exactly have to worry about being “snatched” away. With that level of development (the Internet has been around for more than a few days, I believe), they may want to go work for Microsoft where their lack of basic skills (development) will be welcomed. If they worked at Google, they’d be gone (imagine if Google didn’t work for three days). Mostly through, PaidContent’s lack of Internet skills is pretty darn embarrassing considering it’s their only distribution vehicle. This isn’t rocket science.

Bill
You’re jumping to conclusions based on no knowledge of the situation, sad to say.

I am a student and have been reading your content for awhile. Love your content and new design.  Keep up the good work!

officially the best news design i’ve seen on the web. congrats!

Rafat,
The previous design of the your site was satisfactory, but this is really, really an improvement.  Definitely Major League now!  Very impressive. Congratulations.
Continued success.

well am glad i landed on teh right site for the first time

Looking good Rafat!  Certainly took a doubletake!

Kudos, Rafat & Co. Best thing about it:  it still looks exactly the same in my RSS newsreader. :  )

Hi Rafat & Co.,

congrats on the relaunch and the new, outstanding design! Its been great working with Greg and the Airbag team to get things going for you.

And Bill, it may not be rocket science, but there are days when it feels pretty close. I’ve got 10+ years in this industry and I can attest that Greg and his team handled every unexpected hiccup with poise, wisdom, and grace. Great job guys.

We wish PaidContent & Airbag much continued success.

The pMachine Team

Looks great, Rafat.  Glad to hear most (if not all) of the hiccups and speed-bumps are behind you now

It looks great Rafat and its faster. I hope it remains so fast.

I saw the new design when it went live for a short period of time last week and thought it was superb. Very nicely done.

Congrats Rafat & team. The newly redeisgned site is clean and easy to navigate. Now, the same terrific content is more organized & accessible. Also, congrats on a great Mixer in London last week. 450Plus people...awesome! See you at the next Mixer. Best-jay

Great redesign, congratulations. Your comments on CMS are to the point: the weblog revolution is not powered by the greatest software in the world. And yet it’s gotten us where we are today…

Rafat and team,

Contrats on the re-launch.

Looks really great.

thanks everyone..still lots of bugs popping up...and we are working on it...hopefully things will be smoother by next week.
thanks for the kind words…
ra

A major part of the charm—and ease-of-use—of the previous site was the super-easy scanning ability, where even if you didn’t visit for days at a time it was oh-so-easy to scroll down and see everything within a minute or two.

Now it just stops after 4 or 5 entries.

I’m not sure the rationale behind this change, but it’s risky. Those of us interested in one of the niches you cover will now have difficulty finding the content we’re interested in........and eventually may just drifty away.......

Fascinated by the move to Expression Engine. Frankly, have never used it and only vaguely heard of it. Why the switch from the two other “name brand” guys? Is it really that much more scaleable, manipulable, etc?

Oh, and congrats!

daniel
we are working on bringing out that scanning ability back...we will increase the number of entries. also, the top headlines are right up there in the middle column.
also i am not settled about the main column width (which i want to be wider) but there’s a debate on what to go with, in interest of being accessible on all kinds of monitor resolutions…
ra

dorian
since when did it become about using name brands? pmachine, the parent company of expression engine, is well known among the people it needs to be..it is a more publishing/oriented engine, than say wordpress, which is a basic blogging tool

Rafat--

The site looks good. But I find it less useful than your old site. The good news is the variables are probably ones you can tweak easily. I think the stories don’t run long enough before the jump and there aren’t enough stories on the front page. You also may want to combine your two right hand columns to make a wider main news column.

All these thoughts are about what I liked best about your site: It was a single page where I could get a quick view of everything going on in digital media. Now I need to make dozens of clicks to get the same information I could get with one click. That’s not an improvement.

Just one eager reader’s view.

Saul

dorian,

Very busy sites like http://gov.ca.gov/, http://www.ilounge.com/, http://www.ou.org/, http://www.sacunion.com/ and many thousands of other sites are powered by ExpressionEngine.  The difference is that a lot of sites are using it as a tool and don’t feel they have to tell the world what their site is powered by.  Some places are likely in the position of corporate or other policies to not broadcast/publically endorse what software they are using.  It’s not like any major web site shares what software powers the backend of their sites, so how would you know what is powering it?  Blogging tools and CMS’s are two different beasts, and frankly wordpress is a toy.

I have heard of ExpressionEngine and glad to see the move to it, and the new site design, and congrats!

Thanks, Steven, and Rafat. And, Rafat, “name brand” was shorthand. But your point is well taken. I’d use anything that worked well.

The site certainly looks attractive, but ditto what Daniel and Saul wrote - please expand the number of stories on the homepage when you have a chance. I find that on similar sites, I tend to miss important stories when they are buried under “channels” that I wouldn’t ordinarily be inclined to view.

I think that the channel concept can be useful, especially if I need to return to the site to locate an older post for example, but only if the homepage lists your most recent stories as it did before (since I am interested in reading nearly every post on the site).

I definitely prefer the old site over the new design.

The Cons:
The new design feels too busy and is distracting for me.  The current headlines listing next to the channels listing especially.

The stories definitely don’t run long enough above the fold.  The width of the primary column is too narrow.

Showing “Channels” that are empty is also frustrating.

The Pros:
The colors and contrast are an improvement over the previously excessive white.

Very readable font.

Hello,

Just wanted to reach out and congratulate you on the new site.  The interface is very nice.

Megan

Saul
To answer your specific query:
-- the current headlines box was made to overcome that issue: you can scan top 10 headlines immediately in the first screen...that we can increase to 15-20 depending on some more feedback.
-- the excerpting has to be done: again, balancing issue: if we want to fit in 30 odd posts on homepage (we are increasing that from current 20) without the pages running too long, and the main page file size getting too big, we have to excerpt...one small tip: if you are using RSS, you would not even need to hit the homepage
-- the main news column to be wider: that is what will happen, but that will take longer time...possibly 2-3 weeks...that is a major design change and the team is overloaded with other design issues and correcting errors. but it will happen because i think it is narrow too.

Congrats on the change.  I’m a regular lurker and, more importantly, I’m preparing my two websites (two small-market but high volume daily news sites that have no newspaper or broadcast outlet to feed them) to move to EE. (Trying to do it myself—not enough scratch for a team like Airbag Ind.)

I love the software, and agree with the comments about blog software not being the same thing as a full content management system.

This will be our third CMS and, we hope, the last.

One of these days, you should post on your experiences using EE for daily publishing.

Cheers Rafat. Simply outstanding - love the new look and feel. All the best

It’s interesting to see how the majority of early post seems to be from folks that took part in this effort and self-congratulating one another.

In the end, it is a sad day when another site succombs to the mantra of redesigning to create a much less efficient user experience:

- There is now so little information available without scrolling like mad that not much can be gleaned by simply glancing at the screen like the old site allowed (this is at 1024x768). A of this writing, the only thing showing on the home page is the redesign note and 5 headlines.

- The posts are now excerpts. Who really thinks that people want to waste more time waiting for yet another page to load?

- The font is so big that again very little fits and it requires much scrolling. This is combined with excessive spacing. Yes, the site looks airy, but too much so.

I won’t say go back to the old design as there is no reason to want to remain stagnant, but usability is something that should have improved, not regressed. It is unfortunate that whoever promoted this design forgot that design and usability are not synonyms.

Congratulations on the very nice redesign!

> the biggest problem we faced was the content migration.

How so? Was there not any way to get content out via a structured XML document, say, posts and all metadata etc? I’d love to hear more about the content migration issues, and recommendations ideas that came out of it.

Congrats Rafat and team!  It looks very nice as the other one was getting too “busy”.  I’m curious to see how it loads on a smartphone browser as well.  I love EE as well and they have to be one of the most responsive/helpful companies around.  Happy writing....

It’s curious to see you guys moving away from WordPress and MT when far larger and advanced publications are moving toward them. I tried out EE last month but it felt like amateur hour after WordPress, the community around it was so much smaller you’re stuck at the whims of the somewhat-quirky development team.

But I guess if that’s what your designers talked you into, you’re stuck with it. Hopefully no more painful migrations in the future. We come here for the content, not the design.

Sadish, that’s how I felt when I first moved to EE, but I still kept it due to the amount of features over WP and preferred it over to the clunky MT (IMO).  The devs are quirky, no doubt, and I’m always in the dark about what’s coming next, but the good thing is there always seems to be something coming next and the development keeps on going.  I’ve yet to find the perfect CMS that’s at least part blogcentric, but for now I think EE is where it’s at, especially for multi-blog environments.

Like Dave above, I hope you guys will post your about your experience with EE at some point.

I’m curious to your feature story - is it just stickied, or is it a separate blog underneath?

re: old design - it was awful in FF for me, always had text going into areas it shouldn’t.  This is definitely more readable.  Maybe a little less clicking wouldn’t be so bad, but at least I don’t have to highlight text to read it.

I like this one… although I missed the old one.

I have misgivings about the new design, particularly because I used to use the old version of the site in a particular way. 

I tend to look at trends and I prefer to look over a series of dates for what happened when. I used to be easily able to view and search against the date in the old format and literally hunt down what happened on August 30th 2006. Very useful to those of us that are looking to track when different events happened and when stories were released on this site. Your site is my first source, not my second or third, so being able to search by date is important to me.

Further Pros and Cons on the Change from a design perspective:

1. In a 1024x768 screen, half of the screen is taken up by a line of banner ads in the middle of a huge masthead/ads/tiny navigation visual combination. That’s a huge annoyance for me, I hate not being able to get to content right away, and having to scroll as a result of the huge masthead. You’re using a three column format, you couldn’t stuff those ads into a side column? Art is nice, but not if i come to you for details, news, etc. And why is it so big on every page? The sub pages don’t need this huge header/masthead. You’re a content guy right? Let me get to your content.

2. I know you’re still working on the templates, but I’d do something to differentiate the design from Engadget It looks exactly the same and is really only slightly different in titles and maybe one or two differences in information pods.  Engadget is too busy as it is, but at least their fonts are big, and stay big. Yours drops down a size after the first story. Why is that?

3. I like the recent comments, and wouldnt mind seeing the text of some of those contents. Just telling me who posted provides me with little information unless I’m rabid about reading someone who’s name I’ll manage to remember or recognize.

4. I love the move to expressionengine. They do great work over there.

5. I love the colors on the new site. Very cool, calming, corporate and relaxed, but there’s something to be said about the colors of the old. They kept you awake ;D

I’ve got other commentary on this but I’ll save it for a more serious discussion of deeper issues on the design and structure

And I’m sorry, I do have to add one more complaint, Kevin is absolutely correct. I also would prefer getting more content up front, not little blurbs. I do feel like I’m doing a ton more side page loading :/

Usability is incredibly important and soft launch or not, I’d actually love to see this backtracked to the old version of the site while you revisit the usability factors. No real reason why you can’t make the move to ExpressionEngine under the old design concept...well other than the money spend on this one I presume. :grin:

Hey Jonathan
Believe me, we are working on implementing almost all of the suggestions you have..give us a month..I know, that’s a lot, but we will work these things out.
We can’t move back to old...the designers will commit suicide
ra

the type size in the daily newsletter version is microscopic. can you enlarge?

The site looks great Rafat. If you don’t mind my asking, what your primary reasons for moving from WP to Expression? I’m a blogging consultant (among other things), and I love to get application-specific feedbak from content experts like yourself.

Thanks in advance. Good luck with the new program.

-Austin SEO Guy

Absolutely beautiful. Three cheers to everyone in the credits +