It is a confirmed and ineradicable part of Internet culture that everyone thinks every site redesign sucks on day one. People are used to what they’re used to and don’t like change. So I am pleasantly surprised at how many positive responses we’ve gotten this morning (not a single negative one yet; late update, okay, one negative one).
But let me take a moment to explain what we were trying to accomplish with these changes. Because unlike most redesigns our aim was not primarily aesthetic – the aesthetic quality, which I’m extremely happy with, was a byproduct of the process which was primarily aimed at better organizing the site and allowing all the different material we publish its own ability to get itself seen and heard.
There were two basic aims we were trying to accomplish. The simplest was to get more of what we produce ‘above the fold’ on the front page. And as you can see, where there used to be about four stories above the fold – in the feature section above the editors blog – there are now 12. But the bigger aim was to more clearly organize and differentiate what we publish.
We publish a lot of things at TPM – usually 50 or 60 new pieces a day every weekday. But they’re not all the same. They’re different in tone, import, size, depth of reporting and subject area. There are quick LiveWire updates, crazy little stories and videos, more policy oriented reported pieces, opinion pieces and the new ‘medium form’ pieces we’re publishing in our new section ‘The Slice’. These are all integral parts of what I want TPM to be. But in the old system they were all poured into one undifferentiated stream. And that created a number of problems.
One is that some readers gravitate to some parts and not others. So we want them to be able to easily go to what they want to read, what kinds of things they want to read. From another perspective, there’s one central groove to TPM – rapid-fire, smart, iterative reporting on the news, with a special emphasis on politics. That’s great. It’s the heart of what we do and we don’t want it any other way. But that central stream – the TPM Torrent, for lack of a better phrase – is so dominant that it’s very difficult for anything else to really hold its own in that river of updates and posts. Not a more considered opinion piece. Not a more densely reported piece about some new development in Washington which may be hard to distinguish on the front page from a quick LiveWire item. This is also increasingly important as we publish more medium and longform pieces. So if you just want to read the meaty pieces or want to read opinion pieces from TPMCafe or The Slice or news from abroad, you’ll know a specific part of the site where you can find those pieces every day. And this will apply to new offerings we’ll be rolling out over the coming months.
So basically we wanted to make the site more easy to navigate, more clear in giving visual cues about what’s where and make it easier for you to focus on our offerings that you like the best.
The whole publishing team was involved in working on this redesign. But I want to thank the three leads who did the core work on this project and brought it together in such a professional and beautiful way. Derick Dirmaier, Christine Frapech and Tom Lewandowski.
Thanks and we look forward to your feedback.
