Reddit Gets A Redesign
- May 26th, 2008
- COMMENTS 5
After about two years, the team over at Reddit has finally unveiled their latest redesign. The new design is a lot cleaner and much more user friendly. The site isn’t nearly as painful to look at now, and navigation has become a lot easier.
One of the main features that shouldn’t be overlooked about the new design is the top menu bar and the “controversial” tab. This area features the most controversial material in terms of votes up and votes down, and is a great way to stay on top of the latest interesting content on the web.
A second major upgrade to the site is the ability to customize what categories of content you want displayed. Sick of reading political news? Just uncheck the box and all the articles marked in the category “politics” will disappear from your screen. This is a really nice feature for picky users who only want to browse articles related to one or two topics.
Overall, the design is a much needed improvement over the old design. What do you think? What would you have changed in the design?
I’m a huge fan of Reddit. garyr_h is the name I use if you dare to check it.
Anyway, I love the redesign. As you said it is much more user friendly, but it has gotten some negative feedback from the programming crowd (which is quite large). The main argument against the design is well… everything. Programmers are minimalists, because they are taught the less code to do something right the better.
Lately though, reddit’s audience has been changing towards something along the lines of what Digg was a year ago (but with programming and politics and not tech). They are in a transition phase. They want to keep the original audience, but yet branch off into something more.
However, like Digg, I can see it changing even more. Programmers are beginning to leave, gamers and lolers will continue joining. (Those of you who are there must notice the amount of lol crap and memes by now).
The changes are good for business, but not those who fell in love with it for what it was. Not all of this is due to the layout of course, but it continues the trend of what reddit has been doing over the past year.
Got to keep modern and contemporary, so a big thumbs up for the redesign…change is good!
I gotta say, the reddit design is pretty uninspiring. I agree with Gary regarding the audience, but still - a little more whitespace wouldn’t harm, and I don’t get why they’ve separated the byline (black writing on a yellow background!), separated from the logo by the navigation - I would have let the navigation hang down below the logo and put the byline to the right of the logo.
I have never really been a big Reddit fan. I stated using them a couple weeks ago and I was wrong, it did help drive traffic to my site.
This thread has alerted me to Reddit, and am exploring it as a traffic driving source, thanks for the heads up!