The New RWN Design Tweaks

You’ve probably noticed some design changes at RWN today. Here’s a quick rundown,

* The list of articles at the top of the page, after the two feature articles, has been dropped. That’s because I was finding that most people weren’t using that section, so it seemed like a better idea to get right to the content.

* All the articles have a title and a short lead in instead of displaying the full article on the page. That makes it easier for people to surf through the 12+ average posts that are on the page M-F.

* Each post opens on the main page, so it doesn’t have to be reloaded and can be closed with the “Read less” button.

* There is a “read all posts” link for each author now.

* The star rating system has been dropped. Personally, I liked the system, but there was a technical issue that had developed over time with it: if you rated, it reloaded the entire page. Unfortunately, that turned out to be surprisingly difficult to fix and it seemed like a better idea to just drop it entirely.

* Some submission buttons that never resulted in traffic for RWN were dropped and some new ones were added. On each post, you can now submit it directly to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, del.icio.us, Digg, Newsvine, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Technorati. Incidentally, do feel free to do that.

* The “Right Wing Video / Conservative Grapevine Promo” will be in a set spot on the page every day.

* The search widget has been moved to a separate page.

* The rotating quotes on each page of RWN have been dropped altogether.

* The biggest plus of this design tweak is faster load time. RWN now loads, depending on the test I use, 25% to 50% faster than it did with the old design. That’s a huge improvement.

The new design is a bit of a change, but I think over time, you’ll find it to be significantly better than the last incarnation of RWN.

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