Another year, another redesign

Welcome friends, to the fifth iteration of Crashpod! Today the ‘pod gets a well deserved face lift, which comes in the form of both fun improvements and fond farewells. Also a fair dose of green! This rebirth is several months in the making, and serves up a hearty dose of refinements to Crashpod’s subject matter, and the way in which the site is organized. I plan to publish more thoughts on the web development industry going forward, as I’ve been a developer for several years now, and feel that offering commentary on your industry is one of the best ways to solidify one’s own opinions.

So, read on to find out the extent of the changes hitting the ‘pod, or explore the site and find out for yourself!

First and foremost, I hope that it’s evident in Crashpod’s latest form that I worked hard to provide coherent information organization for the pod that goes beyond simply a two column layout. One of my favorite things about watching the evolution of websites is observing the trends that come and go in regards to what goes where on a page. Deciding where content is placed in a layout is referred to as “Information Architecture” in the web development industry, and it can play a key roll in how effectively a site fulfills its goal of portraying content for the user.

So, a couple months back when I looked at the former layout of Crashpod, I realized it really wasn’t doing a great job of drawing attention to the most important pieces of information on the site: rather it was just a stack of content users had to wade through if they wanted to find anything of interest. Thus began the process of picking out the most important parts of the site and bringing them to the forefront.Unfortunately, this process also brought to light parts of Crashpod had grown stale, and that it was time to close the book on a couple of Crashpod’s oldest features. So, we bid farewell to both the Crashpod forums and the user submitted destinations. They were great while they lasted, but sadly all good things come to an end. Closing the forums was the easiest decision, as the amount of work it takes to successfully moderate a modern forum is truly monumental, and the Crashpod forums had sadly become a decrepit den of russian cigarette retailers and proprietors of, ahem, “lewd bidness“. So, it was time. Ending user submitted Destinations was a much harder choice, but the flood of social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, and Ma.gnolia made this feature redundant, as most users are far more likely to have seen interesting links from those sites before coming to the pod. This isn’t to say the Destination section of the site is gone however, it’s just that the links found under the Destinations label will now be hand picked by Justin and I, so only the freshest and most compelling will make it onto the site.So there you have it: some additions, some subtractions, but hopefully all improvements. Stay tuned for more thoughts on the rebirth of Crashpod, as I go further into depth on the process of redesigning the site, in a little series I’m calling “Tales of a Redesign“.