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Does anyone still use TechMeme? I never actually used it, but I thought it had mostly faded away by now?
Does anyone still use TechMeme? I never actually used it, but I thought it had mostly faded away by now?
I still do, it's a very nifty site to get an objective feel of tech news. The redesign however is not a very pleasant one, especially the font.
The main points for me are:
- The fonts for starters just don't look good. I'd re-visit that.
- The skinny horizontal menu
- The "More" links below each article summary need work. Its a little overwhelming and just runs on from the text.
I should note that I don't recall what it looked like pre-redesign.
The sponsored posts section disrupts the site and wastes massive space by utilizing only the top fraction, but requiring about 1/3 the width.
The site should be doing a radically better job at sub sets of data by this point. The tabs should be used for that. Instead there's a pointless "About" tab up there - so if I visit Techmeme 100 times, how many times do I need that tab?
It's simply terrible. Really disappointed. I usually scan the site 3x5 times a day.
- functions more like a blog than an aggregate.
- emphasizes sponsors and sharing over the actual headlines.
- prominent sponsor section forces more headlines below the fold, only one or two relevant articles are displayed as a result.
- Newest headlines look like and are placed like Adwords.
- Newest headlines are squeezed so narrow it takes 6 lines of text to say 2 lines worth of information.
- barely any contrast between content and links so the content is now part of the "clutter" they sought to avoid.
- I just blocked(!) Sponsors and Hiring from the page, leaving a big white hole between the content and Newest.
If you don't have Optima (the font), it defaults to Trebuchet, which I find very ugly. Could they not have used one of many available webfonts (from Typekit/FontSquirrel/Google etc.)?
Since it looks like you want to keep it simple and easy; for max compatibility, try just sans-serif. Sans-serif is Helvetica on a Mac, and Arial on a PC. Optima looks really bad at that small a font size, not to mention it looks terrible on a Mac (all smudged). Optima is not designed to be a web/display font.
If you don't have Optima (the font), it defaults to Trebuchet, which I find very ugly. Could they not have used one of many available webfonts (from Typekit/FontSquirrel/Google etc.)?
Checkout Twitter Bootstrap 2 (uut next week) or Foundation. It will make your live so much easier, and the site will be a lot more readable.
http://www.markdotto.com/2012/01/24/bootstrap-2-ready-for-te...
and
- As others have said, the font.
- I get the whole "look like the front page of a real newspaper" vibe, but I think the contrast needs to be adjusted.
- I feel like my eyes don't know where to look first. That's most likely foremost a contrast problem, but there's probably some other tweaks that need to be done.
- The shape of your logo clashes with the implicit and explicit horizontal lines on the site. I don't know how to fix this short of getting rid of the jump in the logo.
- The font on the nav bar is too thin for the very heavy background color. The result is that every link on the nav bar looks blurry... as if the background color is bleeding into the font glyphs.
- The article meta-data takes up WAY too much vertical space. The chief offender seems to be the tweets list. I'd change this to one line. You already have an expander widget, so this wouldn't be too terrible on usability. To emphasize how many tweets there are, why not do a sparkline or "...and 47 others" at the end of the tweet line?
- Get rid of the "newest" column. Put it below the fold under "Who's hiring in tech". You might also steal Reddit's idea of having a box up top where you have the newest stories on rotation.