Here's a comment from a reader on LI design:
[quote]Hi Kian,
Have been a longstanding follower of LI. Just had a few thoughts on its new layout. If I remember correctly, I had made a comment a while back and thought it worthwhile enough to re-iterate.
I personally feel that the new webpage layout is way too cluttered. It unfortunately does not provide me with the clarity of what is where. There are too many boxes, too many sentence story links (which unnecessarily expand on clicking. Particularly since the additional story that you can see on expanding it is not much more than the heading itself since it is the beginning line of the first paragraph and not the headnotes (which if would have been the case would make sense).
I you see the bottom of the page I'm typing on, I can see the story boxes with your face (1), John Wottons face (3) of them, and Raju's face (again 3 of them). Though you are very pretty (and I'm not gay), unfortunately I cant say the same about Wotton (who looks like Rajat Sharma of India TV fame) or Raju and it makes me feel I've entered a mirror maze at rampur ka mela or as if I'm looking through a kaleidoscope.
I don't know if other readers have had this comment. But I thought I should share my views. Please take it no more than constructive criticism, for I am a wellwisher of LI.
Also, the white is too white and the black is too black. So its like working on my word file or watching porn. Median would be good. But then, your blog, your vision. in your words, my two cents (which is gaining value by the day)
Cheers.
[...][/quote]
Thanks for your feedback, but is it really so bad? We've done quite a lot of work to simplify and clean up the look.
The idea is to present a lot of easily scannable headlines on the frontpage, similar to Twitter say, but which not everyone is interested in, so we hide them behind a quick click (which is instant and doesn't even require any new page load to load).
Would you rather read the full expanded short news item without clicking? One stop-gap solution could be to resize your browser window to less than 800 pixels or so (just drag the side border of the browser window until the Legally Wired stories expand).
The boxes at the bottom are meant to highlight old random stories that are interesting. I thought it was also nice to have some more pictures on the page to make it a bit less text-heavy and colourful?
Out of interest, do you like the big box pictures at the top of the home page with the editor's picks stories?
In terms of white and black, not sure there's so much we can do - white is sort of the web standard for reading things. If we changed the black background to dark grey (after clicking on the black and white dots on the top-left of the menu bar on the homepage), would that be better and less porny?
Best wishes,
Kian