TechCrunch Redesign A Sign of Things to Come
Big news! TechCrunch has gone through a pretty extensive redesign.
In post, Mark Hendrickson explained that:
“Our overarching goal was to clean things up, both on the surface and under the hood. TechCrunch had become bloated in many ways, with the homepage taking way too long to load and the scroll bar going on forever and ever.”
You heard it here first but what TechCrunch just completed is going to be emulated (copied?) by many of the leading blog sites that have evolved from one-man operations into blog machines/media publishers with a team of writers churning out so much content to point where there are so many posts, it’s nearly impossible to read them. In other words, they’re suffering from a bad case of blog bloat.
Mark my words, you’ll likely see GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, paidContent, Mashable, et al go through similar redesigns in the near future. It’s not just readability driving this exercise but economic pragmatism; the more page views they can encourage, the more real estate there is for advertisers.
Take a look at what TechCrunch is doing by providing excerpts from its new “home page” that provide readers with a taste before encouraging them to “Read Post”. It’s slightly less convenient for the reader but a brilliant move by TechCrunch.
For what it’s worth, this evolution from blog to online newspaper is something I suggested a few months ago. I’m surprised it hasn’t gained more traction already but you can bet your boots that “the redesign” will become a big trend over the next six months.
Here’s the old and the new TechCrunch:
Technorati Tags: blogs, techcrunch
August 27th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Have anyone seen this site: http://www.dipwa.ca . It’s a canadian version of woot.com . Check out
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woot.com if you haven’t already know the magic of woot.
August 27th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
“….the more page views they can encourage, the more real estate there is for advertisers.”
So, suddenly it’s cool in Web 2.0 land to make a buck? It’s about time the tech geeks woke up and stopped treating revenue and profit as a sin. What took them so long?
GT
August 28th, 2008 at 12:37 am
Re: “Take a look at what TechCrunch is doing by providing excerpts from its new “home page” that provide readers with a taste before encouraging them to “Read Post”. It’s slightly less convenient for the reader but a brilliant move by TechCrunch.”
RM: Mark, ReadWriteWeb has had excerpts on our homepage since our Dec 07 re-design. There’s nothing new here.
And don’t get me wrong, I like the new TC design. But saying that the rest of us will copy it is not factually correct.
August 28th, 2008 at 1:46 am
The load time for TechCrunch was more than 30 secs. This was way too much, I think.
August 28th, 2008 at 5:15 am
[...] down the need to scroll, and brings a better overview. I don’t care if the main reason is to get more pageviews, this adds to readability in TechCrunch’s [...]
August 28th, 2008 at 6:27 am
[...] Mark Evans: TechCrunch Redesign A Sign of Things to Come [...]
August 28th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
[...] has redesigned their index pages in an obvious bid to deliver more pageviews to advertisers. Just 6 months ago, it would have been inconceivable that the flagship of Michael [...]
August 28th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
I think it’s normal because we love new things to come. right?
August 28th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Richard,
Thanks for weighing in. My bad for not giving RWW credit for moving ahead of the pack.
cheers, Mark