Welcome to the redesigned CyberNet! It’s been about three years since we last updated our look, and we thought the site was really starting to show its age. With this refresh we are taking a slightly different approach than we did last time, and you should notice it right away… we’re heavily embracing the use of whitespace.
With our last redesign we made the move to an undoubtedly dark appearance, and this time we did almost a complete 180-degree turn. White is definitely the most plentiful color on the page now, and in general the whole design is a lot more streamlined than the previous one. In the process we also optimized as much as we could to improve the overall performance.
Mobile Site
This is the first time that CyberNet has a mobile site available! You will automatically be directed to the mobile site when you visit cybernetnews.com as long as you’re coming from a mobile device.
We are still working on getting the “switch to full site” mode working the way we want, and so we don’t have that available for the initial release. I do want to point out that some mobile browsers, such as Chrome (on both iOS and Android), have a “Request Desktop Site” option available in the menu. Using an option like that will pull up the full site for you. We should have a better solution in place soon to make the switch more seamless.
This is an example of what our mobile site looks like:
Retired Features
We are also retiring a couple of features. Previously we offered a couple features called CyberMarks and Unread Comments. CyberMarks was the internal bookmarking service that would let users save their favorite articles for future reference, and Unread Comments was a way to keep track of your favorite conversations. Over the years we racked up over 50,000 users and a surprisingly high number of those users (around 25%) used at least one of those features at some point.
What we’ve come to notice is that a lot of user accounts are only getting created to check out how those features worked, and would never return to use them again. I’m guessing some of them are people were checking to see if they thought it was something they should try to implement on their own sites.
Taking all of that into consideration we’ve decided to retire both of those features, and will also be eliminating user accounts. We’ve already cleared out all previous user accounts, and we decided to go that route so that we don’t have to worry about any kind of user accounts getting leaked or stolen later on down the road. Given that we are removing those two features there really isn’t a huge benefit for users to have accounts anyway.
If you did use CyberMarks and would like to have your bookmarks exported just send an email to tech@cybernetnews.com, and be sure to send it from the email address associated with your account so that I’m able to verify your identity. I will then provide you with a list of articles you had bookmarked.
That’s it!
Now it’s time for you to click around the site and investigate everything we’ve changed. Be sure to let us know what you think.
Good show Ryan!
The extra white space makes it much more pleasant to read.
Helps you to focus in better.
Pages seem to come in fast too!
Using Firefox 16b4
Thanks Daniel! I’m glad you agree with the direction we decided to head with the redesign.
I wish you would’ve implemented Disqus, as I find it more interacting, but overall I love the new look. Keep up the great work guys.
Hey Shawn – we contemplated heavily going to a Disqus-based commenting system, but after playing around with it there were just some things that I wasn’t super fond of. They do offer a lot of really great features for tracking comments across multiple sites which I love though. We may revisit it again later on.
I understand. It can be a pain to get working properly for some sites. Hope it becomes more appealing again in the future :)
Looks fantastic — i think the streamlining and simplifying were good choices.
about time the website went through a makeover, i couldn’t stand the old dark design..
Yeah, it was really taking its toll on us as well. Seeing that CyberNet is managed in my spare time it becomes a bit more difficult to find time to do this kind of stuff since writing takes the priority.