Welcome to the 2010 AnandTech Beta

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• Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link

  The print option is coming! Give us another day or two. It got pulled out at the last minute, but not permanently :)
  
  Take care,
  Anand

• BanditWorks - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link

  Congratulations on meeting the self-imposed Q1 '10 deadline AnandTech! Just need to update the favicon to the new logo and I would say that you guys are good to go! <3

• T2k - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link

  ...perhaps it's U2410's my wide-gamut mode?

• damianrobertjones - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link

  I 'really' like the changes and as long as the damn ads stay safe with no re-directions, this will stay as my premium tech page :)

• piroroadkill - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link

  The header logo is too big, furthermore, there's too much wasted vertical space (category buttons have massive white space around them) and, there is too much wasted horizontal space, and there's too much duplication (that silly thing near the top that you can click left and right to scroll through the stories? Yeah, ditch it, total waste of space, since it's horribly slow to navigate).
  
  I liked the way the old design had the most important stories in a clear layout at the top with a brief description, and the blog type posts would never clutter this area.
  
  All the images on the page are too big, and it just feels like I'm scrolling forever to get anywhere near the same amount of content on the screen as before.
  
  You can see the problem right there in your own screenshot: the old design, 6 articles at one time, and it doesn't look cluttered (although it could use stretching to fit horizontally, too), and the new design, 3, and one of them is shown twice(!)
  
  I have nothing against a redesign if it offers a cleaner and nicer way to view things, but.. this isn't it.

• Nickel020 - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link

  Second that. even on my 24" about 1/3 of the vertical page is taken up by the header, that's too much. I can barely see one extra article.
  And the "teaser texts" + "cover pic" for the older articles are also to big, I need to scroll too much to get an overview over al the latest articles. It's a good thing though to be able to read the full teaser texts actually, it has always annoyed me to read half of the text on the front page, click on the article and not find it here!? (I know I can read it by going to the articles category, but that's not exactly good web design to force a user to take a detour just to read the teaser).
  So make the pics smaller, cut down on the teaser text AND finally start putting that teaser text on the first page of your articles. Please?
  But maybe keep showing articles in the carousel and the main column, I like that I have ALL the articles in a chronological order there.
  
  And a link to the blogs is missing, where are the tabs below the carousel?
  
  Overall I like it though, even though it feels like a big change. All the other updates over the eight years I've been coming here were really minor and never changed the feel of the site like this, but if you do it right the site could be better in every single way :)
  
  PS: Are you using a custom CMS or one of the usual suspcts? I'm still too much of a newbie to figure that out by the source...

• samspqr - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link

  the new layout is quite easy on the eyes, I like it, and that means it's truly great, because it usually takes me some time to start to like such changes
  
  anyway, just a couple of things I don't like:
  
  * keep the horizontal section with the latest articles stationary; I don't want it to scroll through the latest aditions, and, at the least, I don't want it to do so by itself (if you want to keep the scroll there, at least put a "pause" button somewhere, and let the cookie remember I want it stationary)
  
  * the "next" button in the comments section takes you to the END of the next page of comments, while it should be (and used to be) the beginning

• semo - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link

  I like the comments section and how you can view all posts. Easier to follow your own thread and see that questions and comments about the relevant articles are ignored.

• Werelds - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link

  Here's the web developer in me popping up!
  
  From a UX point of view, the navigation is pretty good. The guy above me mentions "Too much whitespace" - totally wrong. The use of whitespace is actually good, as it distinguishes between the various content.
  
  Good colour scheme as well, well done to whoever came up with that!
  
  
  Now, some criticism:
  - The frontpage is definitely worse; the intros shown now are much longer, and you don't get a quick glance at what's new. My suggestion would be to add a headline box above the actual listing.
  
  - Minor, but you should really make the comments hard linked instead of pure AJAX. I know it looks cool, but it's horrible from a user point of view as the back button doesn't work anymore for example. Easy fix though; in the click handler, relocate the user to currenturl#pageid - catch that pageid on page load as well, and you can properly hardlink again, with all the benefits of back/forward buttons and whatnot.
  
  - The ad at the top has to be relocated. I know you thrive on ads partially, but your webdevelopers should really read up on some studies from the past few years. Ads are generally overlooked, unless interwoven with content; the one to the right is placed well, because it's constantly in view. Google for "website eyetracking" or "website heatmaps" to find some extracts from and tips based on these studies.
  
  - &lt; and &gt; aren't allowed in posts, brackets or accolades around a word that isn't a valid BB tag also crash the app, might want to write alternative code for that ;)

• Werelds - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link

  An edit button would be great as well :P
  
  Had to adjust the content of my comment like 5 times before it would parse; and I see HTML entities aren't parsed :(