The same great content with an improved look.
Welcome to the new Ars Technica! We know site redesigns are a lot like coming home from work and finding your living room rearranged, so we're very eager to hear from you about problems you encounter, what you think about new features, and anything else we might do to help your browsing/reading experience.
But first, here's some insight on our thought process behind the new design. Ars Technica has grown tremendously over the past five years. We are now reaching 17 million people monthly from all across the planet, and we are proud to say that we have done so not by focusing on quantity of content but quality. We prefer to grow our editorial staff without just creating "more" stuff. Many (most?) publications in the tech scene publish two to three times as much content as we do per day. This doesn't mean we won't try new things, though; in the past year, we've expanded space and health coverage, but we've done so by getting expert reporters like Eric Berger and Beth Mole to bring you the most important news—as opposed to wall-to-wall, wafer-thin coverage. We've opened Ars UK to much success, and have exciting plans for expanded coverage of Europe.
With today's redesign, we are embracing the fact that we do not want to be—and have never been—a place for quick hits and throwaway hot takes. Instead, we like to free up our writing staff to focus on the issues that matter most, at a depth and level that we find meaningful. Concomitant with that is our desire to present information in the most readable and attractive fashion, which we generally mean to be uncluttered, crisp, and well-designed.
In past redesigns, one design motivation really constrained us: information density. We'd measure our success, in part, by how many stories readers could see "above the fold"—ancient industry-speak for the first 600 or so vertical pixels. We have abandoned this goal for a few reasons. First, we want to more clearly and prominently display all of our work, not just some of it. Second, everyone is doing a lot of scrolling these days. While scrolling may have been an annoyance 15 years ago, it's now common on everything from phones to tablets to laptops. Lastly, monitor sizes and resolutions have exploded in recent years, and screen real estate is no longer particularly prized (outside of mobile, of course).
Ars Technica remains an outlier in the publishing world for many reasons, one of which is the simple fact that we have a tremendously strong front page readership. Most publications can't say they get most of their traffic from front page readers—that is, people who arrive at a homepage and then move around the site. Instead, most sites find themselves increasingly (and sometimes completely) reliant on social media and links from other sites in order to grow their traffic. We, on the other hand, have an audience that averages three visits a day to the front page. That meant it was time to look at the front page as a showcase for our work and to take a step back from the clutter-inducing strategies of the past.
Again, we're excited to hear what you think. It would be a great help if you could direct feedback to the right place so we can address the inevitable issues that pop up as quickly as possible. First, if something is clearly broken, please let us know about such bugs here. Second, if you see a missing feature or if there is a feature you think would be easy to build into this new design, feature request comments should go here. Finally, your general thoughts and feedback are welcome in the discussion below. Please note that we will not be monitoring this thread for bug reports and suggestions, however, so please consider where you leave your feedback.
This being our 18th year of existence, we've done quite a few redesigns (see 2004, 2010, or even our recent 2012 relaunch). We know that there will be bumps in the road in the days to come. We appreciate your help in resolving any issues, and we really hope you grow to love the new Ars Technica. We can't wait to also unveil some new site features—such as secure browsing—once we've ironed everything out in the coming weeks.
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