So our first redesign only lasted six months, and here’s what we learned from it: almost everything we thought was great about it, wasn’t. The solution: a mix of what worked in the original design (before Oct. 2006) and in the redesign plus some new ideas.
-- We have stripped back on site color (in the top band), and gone back to being predominantly white-space, meaning less clutter.

-- The stories start earlier in the fold, and we’ve switched back to the main stories’ column being in the middle. We did usability testing and found out that the two columns on the left and right have better visibility in the original format, and so does the main column.
-- The templates have been rewritten from ground up to make sure the pages load faster.
-- From the advertisers/sponsors perspective, a lot of the redesign was focused on providing better visibility for the messages and stripping out extraneous color. Though the ad units remain the same, we’ve made placement changes—again to help visibility.
-- We have made similar design changes to the newsletters and also have made technical changes to improve their deliverability.
-- Site search has been improved and you now have the option to search across our news sites.

Some new credits for the re-re-design: The Benzinger brothers, Brian and Tim, from their agency Parallel, whom I found through Brian’s excellent blog SolutionWatch, insisted on usability even before they started working with us, and every step along the way. As important, our developer and webmaster Jamie Poitra from NetRaising, who’s worked magic on the back-end coding and templates, giving Expression Engine as much flexibility as possible. Also, our thanks to Nevin Lyne, CTO of our host EngineHosting.

We hope that you find it a better experience all around. Please leave comments here or email me at rali AT paidcontent.org.

Regards
Rafat Ali
Editor & Publisher, ContentNext Media (paidContent.org, MocoNews.net and ContentSutra)