TechCrunch Redesign Review

TechCrunch launched a new design today.  As one the of the few blogs I actually read every day, I’m extremely glad to see this new design.  The old design was too cluttered, slow-to-load and too bright.

The new design is a pleasant change to a much more minimalist look with a clean interface.   The navigation is more logical and well-placed.  The site’s HTML isn’t valid, but I don’t really care.

The biggest change is a switch from Full Post to Excerpt.  While I like the look and feel of this change a lot, I find it’s much more difficult to read all the stories as I normally do.  Fortunately, they thought of that and placed handy Next/Previous Post links at the top and bottom of every post. This will probably be great for their pageview count and advertising revenue which I’m sure they didn’t consider at all…  There also appear to be more posts on the homepage.  I’m not sure what affect this will have on SEO or anything, but it is nice to be able to quickly review all the new posts.  Overall, I’d say the change to excerpt is an improvement.

The sidebar is also much cleaner in appearance.  Rather than being a complete distraction as in the past, I feel it’s almost worth having.  The CrunchBoard Jobs and Seesmic widgets standout a lot more to me now if only because they blend in more.

There’s a lot less green and little more grey in this approach.   Some of the commenters were complaining about the site looking too newsy or traditional.  Personally, I love the new appearance.  It’s a more accurate representation of what TechCrunch is today.

I have two negative comments.  Their new featured posts widget is centered on the homepage and on the sidebar of every post page.  The background color (light tan/yellow) for this widget just doesn’t seem to fit with the green and light grey. I’m not exactly sure what I’d do instead, but I’d experiment with it a little more.  Maybe go with a dark green or dark grey header and a light grey body.

Secondly, the footer seems seriously underused.  Over the past months, a lot of attention has been paid to blog footers in the design community.  I think this is a great trend and well thought-out footer can be a tremendous benefit to a website.  Maybe I’ll design a footer for TC and see what they think as a follow up post.

In summary, I’d have to call this redesign a great success and even overdue.   Nice job, TC!

Update: Here’s some additional reviews:

DailyBlogTips:  TechCrunch Got Redesigned

Mark Evans: TechCrunch Redesign A Sign of Things to Come

reaact.net: The TechCrunch redesign

Online Media Cultist: TechCrunch redesigns: over undesigned?

Devlounge: Design Critique: The TechCrunch Redesign

And it looks like TC already addressed the background color  of the featured post widget and edited it slightly.  Still not quite perfect, but definitely much better than the original version.

3 Responses:

1. Henry Work:

   Hey James,

   Thanks a lot for your comments. We’ll definitely take them in. Please do tell if you mockup a TC footer.

   Cheers,
   -Henry

   Aug 27th, 2008 at 1:44pm

2. Zach Kaktin:

   Great post. Just did a search for techrunch redesign and your site popped up. I like it, in certain ways, but will be doing a review too!

   Aug 27th, 2008 at 11:18pm

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   Oct 27th, 2008 at 6:47pm

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