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:

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