New site design

[raceright]

Having looked at some of the sneak previews of the 2nd phase of redesign, I have to say that I am not too impressed.

Rather than create something original for a site with a great cycling history, it seems to replicate the bike radar templates to produce just another version of it. Pretty disappointing stuff from future publishing.

This is less a forum thread and more just feedback on the design. Wasn't it possible to look at it from fresh eyes?


Thanks,
Neil


http://www.raceright.cc

 

[Anonymous]

you are not suggesting that this navigation...

looks like this navigation

are you?

im reserving my judgement till i see it, we can all get too worked up about something that isnt even launched yet.. .(and even if we dont like it, its tough.. lol)

woe betide tech though if it dont work with opera..

 

[raceright]

That's the one, and I think its fine for bike radar, but don't think it should be used here. I do a lot of interface design for the web, which is why this interests me, and feel there could be some more creative thinking applied.

But you are right, there isn't much I can do about it!

 

[elapid]

Agree, Bike Radar duplicate. I know that Bike Radar and Cyclingnews are associated in some manner, but hope this new site would be more original.

 

[Anonymous]

im just old school.. cant stand newfangled unneeded junk...
i still use straight text hyperlinking when i build sites (very occasioanlly rollover images but rarely)..

Simple.. effective.. works..

We shall see..

 

[tifosa]

Cyclingnews: If you're going to use navigation tabs, you might as well offer "Doping" and Non-Doping" tabs. This way, people can navigate where they want.

Might it be possible to offer those same two tabs for this forum? Or, does everything always circle back to doping?

 

[Daniel Benson]

Hello All,

I don't think anyone mentioned the D word until it was posted in this thread, but no, I don't think we'll be having navigation that includes it.

Regarding the more general feedback: While the navigation and some elements of the platform will have similarities to our sister site, BR, we'll still be populating CN with the same in-depth level of news, interviews, features, results, tech and images, as before. In fact, so many elements of the redesign will have greater functionality and navigation while the editorial voice will remain key cornerstone of our coverage, that I’d ask you to be patient and wait for the final, rolled out version.

I can't of course promise that you'll love it, but remember it has been designed with you, our loyal audience in mind, and as always your feedback is important to us.

Thanks

Daniel
Editor, CN

 

[the_kman]

dont change it

bloody hell its fine as it is. having it all in one section introduces the other disciplines to people who only focus on say road.

u change it an noone is ever gonna look at cyclocross (lol)

people like this site and wont leave if it stays normal. its when u make it more about ads and change things more often then facebook people will get turned off.

at least vote on it..

 

[Stani Kléber]

Content! I don't care too much what the site looks like, it's easy to navigate already. I just want news and results on the front page with the occasional interview and magazine piece.

As for too many adverts, I can't see a single ad! Because I use adblock...

 

[Anonymous]

i do actually like the old if it aint broke dont fix it...
depends what cyclingnews is..
if its a "media" site then it needs to be more glitzy, more appealing to the layman
if its a "information" portal then it needs to be functional with as much information as possible as easily accesible as possible

at the moment it for me happily fills all the criteria for the latter.. lets hope the new aim isnt the former..

but like i said before.. its happening, gotta assume the it bods know what they are doing (although dont guarantee it.. depends if they are cyclingnews staff, or outsources.. if they are outsourced they are just after the money.. lol)

anyway.. when it happens it happens.. just make sure it works in opera.. lol...

 

[Daniel Benson]

Thanks for the feedback. We're actually very close to going live with the new site. We'll be rolling out changes over the coming days.

As a reminder, here's a list of what you can expect from the new site:

- New, clearer navigation
- faster news
- RSS feeds
- a cleaner design
- newsletters
- riders and teams sections
- the same delivery of quick and comprehensive content

That last point, despite being at the end of the list, is the most important and we've ensured that it has been entrenched in our plans so that our users can come to the site and get exactly what they want from it.

During the next few days we may have a few technical teething problems but with an army of developers on hand, we hope to keep any disruption to a minimum.

Thanks for your patience and enjoy the new site.

Daniel

 

[180mmCrank]

The people who like it will not say much the folks that don't will have plenty to say I am sure we all go through... Shock Anger Denial Resistance Acceptance on our way to...what was all the fuss about!

My own view - I am sure it will be just a good and probably better than the existing site and it will take me a few days to get used to it. Looking forward to it.

Make sure you have a big party to celebrate the launch and recognise all the effort and man hours that have no doubt gone into this.

Thanks for being such a great service to the all us avid fans of the sport

(Is that too suckie suckie?)

 

[James Jordan]

Well here is my two cents.

I was afraid you were going to go down the bike radar design. A design which actually pushes me away from the site.

- New, clearer navigation
MAJOR FAIL. The site is cluttered, its hard to find out what is new and is just plain annoying to navigate.

- faster news
It may be faster, but if I cant find out what is new its does not provide me any value.

- a cleaner design
See my first point, you have made the site more cluttered and harder to navigate.

- the same delivery of quick and comprehensive content
No good if I cant find it.

I have always relied on Cyclingnews to keep me up to date with the world of professional racing as its almost no existent in the normal news here in Australia.

Thank god that SBS's Cycling Central site is starting to get some more content as I don't think I will be visiting the site as much as I use to.

 

[ianfra]

If it ain't broke

How absolutely awful. I can't believe that designers can take a perfectly good website and muck it up as much as they have. I immediately thought "If it ain't broke don't fix it" and then went to the forum and found that someone had got there before me.
On the old site there was daily news (fantastic) and up-to-date results as they came in. On the new site you have to click a few times before you get the results from any stage or race. Why???? There is no need to design like this.
News now comes in on a one-off basis? Why not daily news as before - it worked well and I could easily see what I missed?
What a shame that we do not have an alternative website to escape to. Cycling News did the job very well and now ..................

Well it always was the first thing on my computer but now its been destroyed I'll rethink.
So sorry editors and designers - this is a real case of form over content. It's utter cr?p!

 

[Geepak]

The new site design is stunning. Very efficient, clean & easy to understand/navigate.

I have been developing websites for the last 11 years and this is a fine example of great web development/design & usability. Some people regardless of their interest or amount of use of this site fail to understand just much content is available and how hard it is to index/display & navigate to efficiently. Just because you only want to read about Tour de France doesn't mean that's all everyone wants to read.

Good job to the Future Publishing digital design and development teams.

 

[Amboss]

Please return to the old design. It was clearlier arranged und much faster.

 

[raceright]

Have to completely agree with James Jordan on this, everything on here puts me off from returning to the site.

I don't think its a matter of getting familiar a new layout either, as I know the Bikeradar one, and have always found it difficult to locate what I am looking for, or for the latest content. All the news is separated out and leads to dead ends from a user experience stance. Subsequently I don't look at it very often.

The old one was miles miles better! Bring it back!

 

[ReddDraggon]

I'm disappointed - I spend a lot of time on the Bikeradar forum - but the front end of Bikeradar was shocking - I used to come to CN to read the articles.

There was nothing I would have changed on the old CN, plenty for you to fix and earn your wages on the new CN I suppose.

Change for the sake of change is not good.

 

[ReddDraggon]

The Pro Bike articles have been destroyed aswell.

http://www.cyclingnews.com/features/fabian-cancellaras-saxo-bank-specialized-s-works-tarmac-sl2

Where's all the measurements, build list etc?

 

[Greg Johnson]

The Pro Bike articles have been destroyed aswell.

http://www.cyclingnews.com/features/fabian-cancellaras-saxo-bank-specialized-s-works-tarmac-sl2

Where's all the measurements, build list etc?

That's a bug being worked on. Probikes will contain the same information as usual.

Cheers
Greg Johnson

 

[Stani Kléber]

That moving flash banner is very annoying, I don't need changing images every 3 seconds to tell me what's on, I can read. Otherwise it looks ok but a bit more clunky, the old version was simple and effective to navigate like a results and news service should be.

 

[Rouleur]

This is awful, I thought it was going to turn into the Web 2.0 nightmare that is BikeRadar.com

People liked cyclingnews.com because it had a simple clean design. That is now broken.

 

[raceright]

There's not much which is 2.0 about Bikeradar!

 

[Simon G]

My feedback on the new design.

1) It is very slow compared to the old design.

The "Today on CN" flash thing starts up a bit after the text, which results in a sluggish rearrangement of the page just as I am starting to read it. Would be nicer to not have this unless it can be quicker.

2) I really miss the aggregated stories on one page, in one or two editions per day.

Then I can see from the link colour whether I read them already and it's easy to keep up with one or two reads per day. Now I have no indication which stories I already read, and I have to keep going back and forth between the top page which is horribly slow to load (see above) and the next story.
Could you put links to navigate to next/previous stories on each one to avoid going back to the front page?
And could you provide one or two editions per day with all the news on one page as before?

3) The archive of daily news now stops on April 15.

Last one is "Latest Cycling News, April 15, 2009".
Can't we keep all of them up to yesterday, as well as keeping this feature for the future too (see 2).

All in all I think it looks pretty but is less usable. Hope you decide to make some tweaks based on this.

Simon

 

[Boxedbee]

This is going to ruin CN.

You took away the ease of use, instant front page information and cross discipline activity for the sake of doing something new. Site skins and information distribution don't have to interfere with each other.

The success if cyclingnews was a result of the front page. Now it's no better than VN.

Please go back to the old formula for information presentation. Otherwise I predict CN will go down.