It's funny to look back at this post almost 2 years ago and think that adding bright yellow buttons to the top of PIC was considered a big change. But after 8 years of the old school PIC look, an ugly masterpiece carefully crafted and re-tweaked every year in Microsoft Frontpage (the biggest headache I've ever known), it was clear the site was due for a serious upgrade. When 1 in 5 people think your website reminds them of McDonald's, and you don't serve fries with it, that's not a good sign.
So last year, Dan Zembrosky, long-time reader/contributor to the site, came in to work on a complete redesign and backend overhaul. What you see now is a lot of CSS, which makes the site load a lot faster, and Drupal, a content management system that makes it a lot easier to publish content and make improvements across the site.
Besides making the site faster, these were our two goals for the redesign:
1. Publish stuff more often.
2. Allow readers and writers to interact with each other (and the site) more.
Up 'til yesterday, we never published more than 3 frontpage articles in a week. Now our goal is to publish a new article every day. Columns have always been on Sun/Wed nights – now you'll probably find a new one every day. Previously, quotes were only updated Mon-Fri, once a day. Now they're updated every day, throughout the day (more on the changes we made to quotes here). We didn't have nicknames before (a feature I've wanted to do since 2006), now we do.
On the old site, comments weren't even part of the same page (except on blogs), and it was hard to link a real identity to each comment. Now, if a user comments while logged in, you'll know who it is by their name/picture (we still allow anonymous comments too). You can also reply to specific comments, vote 1-5 stars on each post to help others find good stuff, add a post to your favorites if you want to come back to it later, and contact writers and members right from their profile (more on member benefits here).
The hardest part about the transition was moving all the old content over. And we're still getting some of it in order, so please bear with us this summer.
I've already responded to many of you from Nate's blog the other day – I know change is hard, especially for those of you who have read PIC for years and gotten accustomed to navigating the site without a second thought. It will get easier again, I promise. And if something is particularly confusing, we'll fix it. Together. You and me. Well, you'll tell me what to do and I'll do it, but that's togetherness, right? That's what my girlfriend told me.
We're the same ‘ol PIC folks you've come to know, we just didn't want anyone else to go blind after staring at the internet equivalent of Ronald McDonald. And we want to make you laugh more often.
Let me know what you like and don't like about the redesign in the comments (or through the contact form). We'll constantly be making improvements based on what we hear from you guys.