A Redesign for The New Stack
In April 2014, we launched The New Stack. The website has been the same ever since.
Until today.
Welcome to The New Stack site redesign, a reflection on who we are, how we serve you, and the infrastructure we built to get to where we are today.
The New Stack’s focus has remained the same since we launched our “Hello, World,” post on April 29, 2014. As we have since our start, The New Stack covers at-scale development, deployment and management. Our primary communities are developers, software engineers and people who develop and manage backend architectures. The New Stack has published more than 10,500 posts since 2014.
“We needed to elevate the design of the site to better match the quality of the content,” said The New Stack’s Aaron Ban, director of software development at The New Stack “In our previous design, we were publishing top-shelf tech analysis but we had more of a blog sort of feel to the site. We wanted to move away from that blogging style and more into a publication style, newspaper style.”
We worked with Stéphane Monnet and Lisa Zych of Monnet Design out of Toronto on designing the new site. They brought their experience as UX and publication designers to the project and offered a thorough understanding of the challenge right from day one. The result is a design that walks the fine line between “website” and “publication” and helps to elevate the TNS UX.
Some of the changes we have made:
- Moved more content above the fold making it more likely to be discovered.
- A new layout makes it easier for the reader to scan the headlines quickly.
- We added more sizes to the story cards to clarify what new or featured content is.
- Added the Key Concepts channel allowing us to “zoom in” on a specific topic and showcase top-performing and evergreen articles.
- Added Podcast and Event modules to the front page (and other pages) to better surface that content.
- We improved how we showcase syndicated content from our sponsors, making scanning more of their headlines quicker and easier.
- We improved the Related Stories module to make it quicker and easier to scan more related headlines.
- Streamlined the Ebook Download process and eliminated a couple of cumbersome steps.
- Better performance: The new site offers a performance boost of about 25%.
- We’ve greatly improved our telemetry (without any impact on privacy), so we can always have a clear, data-backed picture of what parts of the UX are working and where we can continuously improve.
The right column now features our latest posts with the latest posts at the top of the page.
We publish what our readers find relevant. We are now adding a features section to the front page to highlight news of interest and deeper dive articles.
Architecture, engineering and operations represent the three main categories for the site. Each category has sub-topics.
The site has three main sections: podcasts, events and key concepts.
Podcasts:
Events:
Key Concepts:
The redesign of the site reflects nine months of work, said Steve Albright, director of business systems engineering for The New Stack.
“The result is a much improved and intelligent website that allows our readers to quickly find the content they want and discover new content more easily,” Albright said. “Also, our sponsors can now showcase their syndicated content through an improved sponsor note and RSS blog feed. The new site incorporates years of aspirations for improving the reader and sponsor experience at The New Stack.”
