Do You Like Miceage's New Look?

[chesirecat]

Not sure if this has been asked/discussed elsewhere, but I noticed that Miceage has a "new look" in that the old page had big "banner pictures" with the title of the story incorporated into the picture, while the new page has much smaller pictures for the stories. IMHO, I think the old format was much more photogenic as you got a nice big picture with each new article, where as now there is a lot of black spaces, words, and kinda smallish pictures.

Be interested to know what other think.

[swampymarsh]

I'm sure this thread has short lifetime on this board.

Anyway I don't like the new look. It was much easier to navigate before.

[calsig31]

I'm sure this thread has short lifetime on this board.

Only in this forum. I bet it gets moved to the appropriate forum: The Forums I would hope it isn't removed as I think it is a very worthwhile topic that the OP brought up. This is a good thread and I would be happy to hear what others are thinking.

To the topic at hand, I miss the old look where there were links to the main forums on the front page. Other than that, I am fine with the changes.

[MonteJ]

Hate it! It's much clunkier than it used to be.

[chesirecat]

Only in this forum. I bet it gets moved to the appropriate forum: The Forums I would hope it isn't removed as I think it is a very worthwhile topic that the OP brought up. This is a good thread and I would be happy to hear what others are thinking.

To the topic at hand, I miss the old look where there were links to the main forums on the front page. Other than that, I am fine with the changes.

Yeah, it's much harder to follow a specific column, such as Al's column or Kevin Yee's . . . I miss the old big banner pictures with titles, as it made the columns much more dramatic/exciting.

[Mr Wiggins]

The layout looks good to me, but I don't like the blog-style discussion section replacing the link to the MiceChat forum discussion, mainly because you can't easily quote-and-reply to previous posters.

[frollofan]

I don't like how they got rid of the direct access to the DLR, WDW, DLP, TDL, HKDL, and SDL forums

[GhostHostJeff]

I think the older design was easier to navigate and it was easier to know what article was newer.

[calsig31]

What would be great is if the link to the forums page on the top was a drop down so you could select the discussion forum that you wanted to go into without having to go to the page that lists all the forums first.

[MickeyIsMyne]

Definitely not a fan of the new look. Reading the articles was much easier with the old design.

[skoolpsyk]

Yeah, it's much harder to follow a specific column, such as Al's column or Kevin Yee's . . . I miss the old big banner pictures with titles, as it made the columns much more dramatic/exciting.

agreed

[choco choco]

I actually commented right in Lutz's last column about the redesign. Here's what I wrote:

Can I just take an opportunity to say I don’t like the look of the new site.

The old one had personality, a series of large banner pics in colorful font across the front page. It was vivid and appealing, and reminded me of the Sunday comic strip sections of newspapers (and those are designed to attract readers to buy the paper).
This new site is all preformatted and cluttered, and looks to me like one of those soulless corporate news portals.

[chesirecat]

I actually commented right in Lutz's last column about the redesign. Here's what I wrote:

Can I just take an opportunity to say I don’t like the look of the new site.

The old one had personality, a series of large banner pics in colorful font across the front page. It was vivid and appealing, and reminded me of the Sunday comic strip sections of newspapers (and those are designed to attract readers to buy the paper).
This new site is all preformatted and cluttered, and looks to me like one of those soulless corporate news portals.

Agree! It's like the Calvin & Hobbs comic, or others, they'd sometimes put up a big banner pic in color that really grabbed your attention. The old format really made the Miceage homepage look visually stunning, and I clicked on columns that I don't now because they look unappealing. Of course, I read Al's last column, "Yule Pay More", but it would have had a much greater impact if it had a big banner pic with the title over that, instead of a small little squarish picture. The old format had a lot of heart, like Miceage was this great little Indy internet fan letter, now it looks cluttered and less kept up.

Maybe because I'm reading Miceage on a little laptop I miss the larger photos . . .

[Walt Fan]

I do not like it. It looks too corporate. Why fix something if its not broken? Kinda like those handrails on Alice.

[Monorail Man]

Great thread everyone. Thanks for the feedback. Let's explain the re-design, and I'm going to comment inline:

First of all, the old look was hand coded. Meaning, each night there was a change - one of our editors had to edit the HTML, drop in the changes, and then upload them. This was great many years ago, but now that we are running up to 4 features a day, it's not sustainable from a time-spent perspective.

Not sure if this has been asked/discussed elsewhere, but I noticed that Miceage has a "new look" in that the old page had big "banner pictures" with the title of the story incorporated into the picture, while the new page has much smaller pictures for the stories. IMHO, I think the old format was much more photogenic as you got a nice big picture with each new article, where as now there is a lot of black spaces, words, and kinda smallish pictures.

While the old format was photogenic, that also means that automated bots (like Google) couldn't pickup on the latest articles for Google News, or index MiceAge properly. For the long-time reader, this isn't an issue. However, we want MiceAge to get out to as many people as possible, so picking up articles long-term is really important to us. On the old look, once an article wasn't new - Google had no way to pick it up, or get an archive of it.

I don't like how they got rid of the direct access to the DLR, WDW, DLP, TDL, HKDL, and SDL forums

Since most users browse the forums through "New Posts" and other features (subscriptions, etc) - we left a simple link to the forums when it comes to linking to the MiceChat forums. It's highly recommended that you bookmark the specific forums you are interested in or browse from the forums front page.

Yeah, it's much harder to follow a specific column, such as Al's column or Kevin Yee's . . . I miss the old big banner pictures with titles, as it made the columns much more dramatic/exciting.

Good to note that if you use the Features dropdown, or click any of the categories for a specific article, you'll get more articles from that specific column. As for the large images, those were taking several hours a night to be hand-composed - they were neat, but with more Disney and other content coming down the pipeline, it's not sustainable to do several of those a night.

I do not like it. It looks too corporate. Why fix something if its not broken?

From a long-time visitor perspective, MiceAge was not broken. From a web standards, and internet search optimized perspective - it was. Believe me, we're still not corporate (there's only 2 of us doing the technical back-end here).

We want to grow MiceChat/MiceAge, and have our existing readers enjoy the content, but we also want to bring in new readers. MiceAge is celebrating 10 years, but lots on the internet has changed in 10 years. Al's last article was our biggest EVER. Why? Because we got a whole flux of visitors to the site - it got picked up by dozens of Twitter bots, was liked nearly a 1,000 times on Facebook - and we found that these new users explored our site more, found more content than before. Indirectly, that means more revenue. Revenue so we can have more content, do more neat events, and exist on the web. Running a website this large isn't cheap, and if we can bring in more traffic to allow us to cover those server bills, then we have to do it.

MiceAge and MiceChat are not stagnate in their look, they have never been. You can expect more changes over the coming months and you'll see lots of new features, and new content. We needed to ensure that that content system is manageable, and that we didn't have someone spending hours a night every night to get you to your content, instead of writing more content. We'll tweak the look, the format, and the layout over the coming months. There's lots we can do with a modern backend, and it will ensure that MiceAge and MiceChat stay around for a long time.