A message to our readers
We feel your pain!

May 25, 2000 | When we redesigned our site, we asked for your comments -- and hundreds of you took us up on that. Though many of you have written to tell us you liked our new look, most of you let us know in plain English ("It SUCKS!") that you disapproved. I'm sorry that I and the rest of the Salon staff haven't been able to answer all the flood of e-mail, but I wanted to address some of your concerns here.

First of all: We hear you loud and clear about the small type size on our home page. Look for this to change soon, along with other tweaks to the site design to improve readability.

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Secondly, I want to apologize for some of the glitches many of you may have encountered in the way of broken links, missing story pages, slow site performance and so forth as we are making this transition. These are already diminishing, but I know that Salon has been harder to read this week because of such problems, and we're all working round the clock to correct them.

We know that Salon has become a daily fix for many of you, and when that's disrupted, you're understandably annoyed. Some of you have asked us why we have even bothered undertaking a redesign -- what was wrong with the old one?

We've regularly reviewed and revised our design at Salon roughly once a year from the very beginning. This time around we had two big goals. One is simple: We want Salon to be even more up-to-the-minute. We will be posting more stories round the clock, and in order to facilitate that we needed to build a better software back-end with more production automation, and an interface that supported the display of a lot more content. The software is still going through its shakedown period, but once we've worked out the kinks you're going to see a great deal more, and more varied, new material on Salon throughout each day.

Secondly, we found, and user testing confirmed, that as we added more and more stories, columns and reader services to our home page every day, it became increasingly difficult to showcase the richness and variety of all that content on our home page. Our solution is to organize this growing editorial banquet more heavily around our individual site home pages, and use our Salon.com home page as a launching point for those pages rather than a simple story list. (If you prefer a story list, we offer that as well, on our Articles by Date page.)

We're not wedded to this, or any other aspect, of this design, and once it's had a chance to settle in and prove itself we'll be evaluating all of its features, enhancing what works and ditching what doesn't. We went through a similar process a year ago. Last April, when we first launched our "old" design -- the one many of you are now extolling -- we faced a similar e-mail hailstorm: many of you told us exactly what you didn't like about it, and we listened and adjusted. We'll do the same this time around, I promise.

--David Talbot
Editor

salon.com | May 25, 2000

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