CyberNet Redesign Coming This Sunday

Sunday is the big day! Over the last month or so I’ve been spending every ounce of free time I could scrounge up working on a site redesign. After all, this one has served us for two wonderful years. This time around I took a lot of things into consideration based on the feedback I’ve heard about our current theme. The most common point of criticism is that our theme doesn’t have a “geek” feel to it. I’ve got good news… the new theme screams geekery.

That’s not all I wanted to do this time around. These days a lot of companies are placing a heavy focus on performance. Apple is doing it with their next operating system, and so is Microsoft. I’ve also seen a lot of websites getting tweaked so that they perform well. Computers continue to get more powerful and the Internet is getting faster, but there is an rapidly emerging market we need to take into consideration, and that is the mobile market. Apple showed us with the iPhone that a mobile device is capable of displaying full websites, but a lot of them are so media-heavy that this isn’t always feasible. The new CyberNet will even be fast to load on the devices that you carry in your pocket thanks to its light use of media. We’ve also rewritten all of the features our registered users can take advantage of, which includes new comment tracking and our homegrown bookmarking system called CyberMarks. Faster faster faster!

Performance was important during the design process, but that wasn’t what our primary focus was on. The more I read sites on the Internet the more I find myself amazed at how hard it’s getting to find the most important things on a page, which is the article content and the comments. And I’m not just pointing fingers at other sites because I’d classify our current site in that same category. When creating our new design I placed the content and comment area on the page first, and then worked around it. We wanted to make sure these things weren’t merely an afterthought where we’re left saying “um, let’s squeeze it in here.” Instead your eyes will naturally be drawn to all of the most important aspects on the page, which is the way it should be.

I’m sure some of you were hoping that we’d post a screenshot or something of that nature for you to grab a peak. Nope. All I’ll say is that the new design actually uses the same color scheme as our current design… the orange, red, and turquoise are all carried over in one way or another. To spice things up we’re also introducing some new colors. Don’t worry, the fact that we’re using a lot of the same colors won’t likely be apparent when you first see the site.

So stay tuned. Early Sunday morning (8-9AM Central Time) is when I’m hoping to roll it out. I’ll probably need about an hour to get everything upgraded and ready to go, but be sure to stop by. If you follow me on Twitter I’ll probably be posting during the rollout process.