Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2005 > December > 13 > Entry
A shiny new site
Web site redesigns are a tricky thing because no matter how good your new design is, regular visitors are going to complain that they liked your old design better. For those visitors, it’s like going to work one morning and finding out that all the roadways and directions have changed. It takes a little while to get your bearings.
Fear of that kind of reaction, I suppose, it’s what’s kept my personal Web site to the same strict design for five years with minimal changes.
Not so with statesman.com, which just this evening relaunched. To my virgin eyes, it looks… bigger. Don’t you think? It feels as if the page is larger somehow even though it’s in the same-sized window as what I was looking at on the site earlier today. Things don’t feel as jammed and crammed in the content areas. Although I’m wondering about how just when you scroll down to get away from that holiday Dillard’s ad, boom! there it is again on the bottom left, the same impossibly happy family following you like a haunted painting.
I very much like how the blog list names just hang there in space and when you click on them, —whoosh! — a panel comes down showing a photo (not a great photo, in my case, but a photo) and the latest blog entry. It’s like I’m a magic trick, and I think I like it.
As of this writing, austin360.com has not unveiled its new design yet. It’s backstage, primping and flexing in front of the mirror, ready for its high society debut, I’m sure.
So sue me. I’m excited.
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