C all it TMO 4.0, or something along those lines. Weire pleased as punch to announce a brand new design at The Mac Observer. This has been in the works for the last year and a half, seriously, and we couldnit be more excited about it. The design work was done by Raena Armitage, a long-time Web designer who is also a TMO staff member. She did a terrific job, and canit thank her enough for her hard work!
The new look and feel at TMO can be found at our beta site, though you will only see the new home page. To be clear about that: If you click through to a story as of this writing, you will get our current design, and not the new one. Weire opening up the design for comment, and will be rolling the design site-wide early next week, barring any new developments.
The most prominent new feature, aside from us finally ridding ourselves of the hated teal that is our current color, is the ability to get your news listed with teasers, or as headlines. We have also included an awesome font sizer that allows you to set the way you see TMO.
Other changes include a simplified menu bar, a shorter heading, all new colors, a way to see important stories on the home page for a longer period of time, revamped Reader Specials that will allow us to bring you many more Specials, and a cleaner design that we think is easier to read, and easier to look at.
Other changes that are in the works include a completely revamped comments system. That will be rolled as soon after the new design goes live as is possible. The new comment system will include ordering the comments from oldest to newest, seeing the entire comment on the article page, tying in the comments to our forum membership, and thus requiring registration to post, and the implementation of system-wide comment moderation. These changes have all been asked for by our readers for some time, and will also help address some of the problems of excessive trolling that have manifested in recent months.
We have some other enhancements we are bringing to TMO that will also be announced in the near-term future, but this new design is the starting point. We hope you like it, but more importantly, weire soliciting feedback. Let us know what you think!
Bryan Chaffin
Editor
TMO