
Gawker’s Gulp Moment: Big Redesign Is Driving People Away - andre3k1
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/17/gawker-redesign/
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harisenbon
It drove me away. Besides the horrible readability of the site now, my main
method of news surfing (middle clicking on anything that looks interesting,
and then going through each of the tabs one by one) no longer works on gawker
sites.

I never realized how enslaved I was to gawker (kotaku and lifehacker to be
precise) until I stopped reading them. The amount of free time I have now (to
waste on HN) is astounding.

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lurchpop
Part of the catastrophic drop may have been google referrals. I've noticed in
the past with old sites if you do a dramatic upgrade on them, google recoils a
bit and starts re-indexing. i've seen search referrals take up to six months
to completely rebound. The big shocker here is if google hits their homepage,
it's met with a big "fuck you". I knew they were doing "shabang" but didn't
realize they had zero fallback for no js.

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SeanLuke
The SiteMeter graph is telling. But the Quantcast graphs, on which this
article is hanging its hat, say nothing at all. The author appears to have
misinterpreted the graphs without first looking up the concept of
"overfitting".

~~~
mono
The SiteMeter graph is irrelevant too as they didn't add the SiteMeter.js.

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patrickk
Nice hack to get the old Lifehacker and Gizmodo back:

<http://ca.gizmodo.com/>

or

<http://uk.gizmodo.com/>

Works exactly the same for lifehacker. The new design, apart from it's
disorienting scrolling behaviour, it's also very inefficient in terms of using
screen real estate well. Impossible to quickly scan articles and determine
which ones are worth reading. Fortunately you don't even need to see the ugly
redesign.

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evandavid
The new layouts for both gizmodo & lifehacker seem quite buggy to me (Mac,
latest Chrome). Most obviously, there is a grey line that tracks its way up
the screen as I scroll past 'the fold'. And I agree with earlier posters: user
test before release (qualitative), and split test as part of the release
(quantitative).

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AdamTReineke
If you tried RSS and were frustrated with the previews of their posts, try
their full feed: [Gawker site].com/vip.xml

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tingley
Silver lining: I discovered m.gawker.com.

~~~
saurik
Unfortunately, I discovered this by trying to find an article I had once read
(about the effects of caffeine usage) by doing a Google search on my iPhone
and then clicking the link, which detected I was on an iPhone and redirected
me to m.gawker.com (or m.lifehacker.com or something like that), throwing away
the hash URL and putting me at the root of the site. As there is no safe way
to do a 302 redirect with a hash URL this strategy is doomed to fail.

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dasil003
Weren't the sites down for a while too due to JS problems?

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fleitz
The most important lesson that can be learned from this is: split test
everything.

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aneth
Could this also be related to how data is reported to Quantcast? Many of what
used to be page loads are now AJAX requests - and the page loads on Quantcast
may have recovered after they added API calls on notify Quantcast.

