As you’ve probably noticed, at the end of last week the skybox links at the top of every TPM page were replaced by a curated selection of poll averages from PollTracker, TPM’s proprietary poll aggregating and trending application.
We did this for two reasons.
First, our focus is political news and PollTracker is at the core of our coverage for the 2012 campaign. So we wanted to make them as visible and accessible as possible. If you see a contest in up there in the header section that you want to see more of just click it and you’ll go to the contest page with the latest average, trend chart and all the polls of the race. If you want to go to the PollTracker homepage just click the PollTracker logo there on the right.
We’re going to be rolling out a series of exciting new features for PollTracker over the next two months, so stay tuned.
As for the skybox stories, sometimes you learn from readers that something just isn’t working. That’s what happened here. When we did our last redesign, our idea was to have sections of the front page where we the editors chose what stories to highlight and others where you chose them — taking the most popular stories at any one time and rotating them through the skybox section at the top of the page. That seemed like an awesome idea to us. But mainly it seemed to confuse people and some people even thought that we were trying to pad the front page by showing some articles twice. That was never the intention. But the fact that even some people thought that was good evidence we’d made a mistake.
We hope this makes for a better and more varied experience reading the TPM front page and the back pages too.
We’re always curious to know what you do and don’t like about the layout of the site. So if there are things you do or don’t like, please tell us. The best way to get our ear, as always, is to send us an email at our main TPM tips and comments line which you can find right up there at the upper right hand corner of the site next to the search field.
