Recent Blog Entries
LAUNCH: Refreshed Homepage Is A Go
Written by Mike Rundle on February 1, 2006
If you scan over to the 9rules homepage you’ll notice it’s a bit different — I don’t think this is a 3.0 design, but it’s like a 2.5 if I had to version it 
Why Change?
When we moved to our amazing new (mt) Media Temple servers, a whole world of new opportunities opened up for us on the development/architecture side of 9rules. Some have joked saying that 9rules or 9rules Communities is just “WordPress with Categories” but in fact we have custom cron jobs running at all hours of the day, caching and updating all our member content, their RSS feeds, their favicons, and a lot more. Colin will be talking about in Part 3 of his series, however our previous homepage was running off the old infrastructure so it was really slow. This new homepage is running 100% from our new database and caching infrastructure, so it loads faster than this weblog probably loads. Colin worked his tail off on speed optimization, and if you scroll to the bottom of the homepage, you’ll see in the footer just how fast this bad boy is moving now. It’s like greased lightning!
Traffic Spread
One of the things that the previous didn’t do was spread traffic around to the other parts of 9rules effectively. We now have an entire wealth of information in our Communities and Featured sections, and they weren’t getting enough exposure. The new homepage drops more links to those two sections, which will hopefully move users deeper into the site and check out more member content.
So What’s New?
On the geeky side of things, the new homepage now runs off our master CSS file so it makes it a lot easier to update. I think the CSS powering the 9rules site is now past 1300 lines, due partly to my incessant indenting and commenting
Less Saturated
A lot of people really liked the previous iteration, but one gripe that stood out was that it was too bright, too saturated, and I definitely agree. We liked to call it the Skittles iteration, but Skittles no more! The new version is more subdued, more in-line with the design for the rest of the site.
More Member Content
The new homepage features direct access to a lot more member content, which is exactly how it should be. Without clicking any tabs to swap boxes, you can view the latest member entries, some random entries from the past 7 days, and the latest Featured blog entries which could be considered a “blog on the blog network.” Everywhere you look now there’s a link to a great member article, so hopefully this will increase traffic to our members’ sites.
Better Ad Placement
We thought pretty hard about where to put the advertising on the new homepage, and after showing our members and getting their feedback a few weeks ago, we think we have a pretty good solution. The ads break up the monotonous boxed layout, so not only do they pay our bills, they also serve a visual design purpose as well. I think we left the red hover box on the ads by accident, so we’ll see what people think.
Featured Member Up Front
At the very top of the layout, below the logo, is now a rotating “Featured Member” box. Now our homepage highlights member content and individual member sites as well, so we’re stoked to see how this affects member visibility.
More Useful About Area
Even though our members’ sites are really well-known and well-read, 9rules itself is still in its early infancy in regards to popularity and recognition. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken to someone about 9rules, and they may not know about the Network, but they sure do read a lot of our sites! The new about section at the top right is more informative, has some more actionable links, and sends out traffic to a few of our Community sites as well. Plus I’ve been wanting to slip the logo in that box for months now, so this was finally my opportunity.
Welcome Back Trebuchet!
Many of you know that I use Trebuchet MS as the main font on a lot of my designs, so how could I disappoint all my fans the 1 or 2 people who know me by not using it? The previous design used some Tahoma, but this one is back to the old standby. Trebuchet MS is the best thing Microsoft has ever done in my opinion
February 1st, 2006 at 3:28 pm
I really like it. Nice job!
February 1st, 2006 at 3:34 pm
Damn fine job. Looks awesome & it’s very easy to use. And much, much faster.
February 1st, 2006 at 3:35 pm
I have to honestly say that I like the site 2 incarnations ago. This one seems a bit “pixely” and lost some of the polish that made the previous ones appealing.
It still looks good, just not quite as professional as before.
February 1st, 2006 at 3:45 pm
Ah, sorry Josh, I guess we can’t please everybody
Thanks Tony!
February 1st, 2006 at 4:00 pm
Really nice work, it looks fresh. Only thing I’m really missing from the old version is the auto-randomizeringness button for random articles from the network.
February 1st, 2006 at 4:09 pm
Fabulous! A birds eye view of everything, loads quicker, the overall feel is better than the previous version, and no more TABS!
February 1st, 2006 at 4:24 pm
Great stuff gang. Much easier to navigate, find kickass content.
February 1st, 2006 at 4:41 pm
The speed difference is instantly obvious. Amazing. I’ve often meant to ask…are the favicons deliberately unsupported in Opera and IE6? The page is at its most divine in Firefox, obviously.
February 1st, 2006 at 5:01 pm
Extremely well done!
February 1st, 2006 at 5:21 pm
Damn nice Mike.
February 1st, 2006 at 5:39 pm
Walker, we honestly don’t know why the favicons don’t show up in IE6 (or Opera now that you just mentioned it) so any help you could provide would be fantastic. We’re basically just linking to plain .ico files, so my guess is that IE6/Opera can only display .ico files as favicons, not actual images on the page itself. The few favicons that show up, I’m guessing, are GIF images posing as favicons. Hmm…. maybe we can use some PHP image jiggery-pokery to convert the ICOs all to GIFs.
February 1st, 2006 at 5:48 pm
Well, obviously Mike doesn’t know. But I think I have an idea. The rendering agent within Firefox, Safari, Omni Web and others are much more loose and can deal with errors within the .ICO binary much better.
If you remember that at one time Mozilla used to show strange JPEG errors, which was for very similar reasons.
I’m converting them all to .ICO, but I’m rethinking that and might convert them all to straight .GIFs. I think that will resolve the issue, however it will make my caching routines a little heavier.
February 1st, 2006 at 6:05 pm
That’s amazing! It’s looking really good!
February 1st, 2006 at 6:15 pm
Yeah, looks like you’re right Colin. IE6 and Opera 8.51 (Windows XP SP2) must use the same mechanism to display icons because output from both is identical. Presumably Firefox is more dependent on its own internal routines (not the Windows API) to render icons because it never fails.
I didn’t mean to create more work for you btw.
I’m just forced to use IE6 at work…and the favicon issue is something I’ve often wondered about. It doesn’t exactly ruin my browsing experience. 
February 1st, 2006 at 6:21 pm
Functionality comment (it all looks pretty enough):
I enjoyed coming to the homepage and clicking Random repeatedly to get a selection of different fresh articles from the sites. But now it seems I have to refresh the page to get a new list of random sites?
Any chance of a button to load new articles without a page refresh? Or does that come under ‘too much server load’.
February 1st, 2006 at 6:23 pm
I love your design, I agree that previously it was too saturated/cluttered/overbearing and I suspect any page that attempts to do all the things you try and do with it will always be like that.
I’m curious to know how much people use your homepage though. You put a lot of effort into it (understandably) - it is one of the most updated pages I’ve seen around in terms of design tweaks - it must be generating some serious traffic to justify all the time you put into it? Just curious.
February 1st, 2006 at 7:03 pm
It looks so… i dont know…
But the old design was so much better. If it aint broke, dont fix it is what I say. My vote is to go back to the old design (yes I am aware this isnt a democracy).
Dont get me wrong the current one is designed well but it really doesnt suit the site as much as the last design did.
February 1st, 2006 at 7:56 pm
Cadence: I agree in that I liked the first version the best with regards to the punch it had behind it, but I like this one the most with regards to functionality. Hopefully we can find a middle ground shortly.
February 1st, 2006 at 8:28 pm
It seems like people really dug that Random refreshing functionality, so I guess we can slip it back in. I’ll chat with Colin, but I’m sure something can be arranged
Thanks for all the feedback!
Darren: The traffic to the homepage definitely makes up the majority chunk of our day-to-day traffic, just because we get such significant hits from people clicking on the 9rules leaf buttons on all our members’ sites. The problem we’ve been having is that once people land on the homepage they don’t navigate to the other sections of the site (blog, featured, communities, etc.) so we’re trying to get users more vested in the member content to be found within. Let’s hope it works lol.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:02 pm
Nice design. Can the “featured site” box maybe offer a mini screenshot of the site? (kind of like the one used in the “introducing site x” blog post).
February 1st, 2006 at 10:03 pm
Oh, also I think that the site name should be listed along with the author (on the newest content thingy).
February 2nd, 2006 at 10:56 am
I love it! The featured member box is a great idea, and your ad placement is both slick and original. It works all around for me.
February 2nd, 2006 at 1:16 pm
Yes we did, Rundle.
I’m casting my vote for a return appearance of the randomize functionality.
February 2nd, 2006 at 2:17 pm
Anyone else notice that the navigation at the top refers to this page as “Weblog” everywhere (that I’ve seen) except for the “Community” page and this one, where it’s referred to as “Blog”?
Obviously not a common header being used…
February 2nd, 2006 at 2:19 pm
Erm, scratch that… It’s the “Blog” / “Weblog” page and the FEATURED page that refer to it as “Blog”, NOT the Community page…
February 2nd, 2006 at 4:25 pm
Much better, the only thing I would add is a little bit of grpahic to push the “What is 9Rules”
February 2nd, 2006 at 6:13 pm
Let me preface the following comments by saying that the content, updates, and sheer heart you guys put into the 9rules network continues to make it my favorite community to follow.
That being said, I hate the new design, almost in its entirety. I understand the technical reasons for the redesign and can see some of the desired results, but quite frankly it looks like a cheap diner menu. Nothing stands out (other than the ads), the navigation is hidden either at the top of the page or in colored boxes at the end of columns of member content that is much more visible than the links to dig deeper.
While some may have disliked the high saturation of the previous iteration(s), I would argue that the contrast helped to separate the sheer amount of content available. This version just feels painful, especially as a successor to some of the best designs I’ve seen online.
I’d have to really look deeper to figure out all that I’m feeling, but my instinct is just crying foul (the diner menu comparison really sticks out in my mind). And, mind you, I wouldn’t say anything at all if I didn’t already look up to the work you guys do (both in design and community building).
On the bright side, the site does load quickly!
February 2nd, 2006 at 11:38 pm
This is amazing Rundle - you got crazy talent. I must admit that I’m kinda jealous so will you please step out onto the golf course with me again so I can feel better about myself
I’ll show you “unparalleled sportsmanship†(jk jk)
February 5th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
I love it! Is there any way/where to see the old iteration(s) of the site? I love seeing how a site’s design progresses through time.
+
May 20th, 2006 at 10:23 am
[...] 8217; Critique
Yesterday we launched with a new homepage and Mike offered his thoughts with regards to why the changes were made. I have spent the last 2.5 y [...]