In this era of reboots, you can’t blame a site for trying to keep things fresh: Today we launch our redesigned homepage, which we hope you’ll like way more than Baby Nut. “I hate change!” you may protest. We get it. But we swear this shiny new homepage provides you all the A.V. Club stories you want, just more of it and faster than ever.
Sound too good to be true? We promise it’s not. We first commissioned a redesign from the engineer who got Slack to work on a Super Nintendo, but they didn’t return our calls. Then we remembered we had our own team of crackerjack design and web experts and tasked them with creating a homepage that would contain more stories in a single frame, consist of fewer ads, and load faster than our previous design. And they did not disappoint.
Let’s take a gander at the new features, shall we? Don’t worry, most things—including the comments section—remain the same.
We know you like going to the movies, so we’re making sure your favorite features and big stories will get the widescreen treatment right at the top of the page. (And as a little gift to celebrate the new homepage launch, we’re giving you Caroline Siede’s bi-weekly column, When Romance Met Comedy, a day early.) This marquee feature space will emerge at the top of the homepage throughout the week when we’ve got something particularly special to share.
Below that, you’ll find a module that looks a lot like our retired homepage layout. But if you look closer, you’ll see we’ve squeezed more stories into the frame, and we’ll be updating this section more frequently, curating the best of the site for busy readers like you.
But wait, there’s more! Our movies, TV, music, books (under “AUX”), and other landing pages are still accessible from the top navigation bar, but we wanted to highlight some of those pages’ great features right on our homepage. You’ll find a good variety of our content as you scroll through, and we’ll be popping in special sections to round up our coverage of big pop culture moments throughout the year. Definitely expect a Bond section soon…
We know many of you avid A.V. Club readers visit the homepage multiple times a day looking for the latest stories we posted while you were in that meeting about having too many meetings. The old homepage put our latest stories right at the top, which was great. But that meant other fantastic features disappeared into the cold ether of the dark web, or wherever pop culture criticism goes to die a quiet death until someone randomly googles, “Can I buy a Deal Or No Deal case?” That wasn’t so great. So now you can find our latest stories, organized by most recent, by clicking “Latest” in the navigation bar. (That link previously took you to our homepage; for that you can just click the A.V. Club logo.)
We will keep tinkering to give you a better experience, but we are the same A.V. Club you have known (and hopefully loved) for eons. And, as always, we want to hear from you: What’s working? What’s not? Should the need arise, we’ll update this story below with any new-homepage FAQs to ease you through this transition. To also help with that, here’s a video of a teacup puppy that’s too fluffy for its own damn good.
206 Comments
In this era of reboots, you can’t blame a site for trying to keep things fresh: Today we launch our redesigned homepage, which we hope you’ll like way more than Baby Nut. “I hate change!” you may protest. We get it. But we swear this shiny new homepage provides you all the A.V. Club stories you want, just more of it and faster than ever.Yeah, it’s just like the AVC’s homepage before the move to kinja, only everything is unnecessarily bigger and more cluttered. Good job, Internet!
If its a step closer to the old ways, I’ll take it.
If its a step closer to the old ways, I’ll take it.
Excellent use of the double-post to remind us all of your presence, Kinja. A++ snark by commenting platform.
Lol. It happens to me so much that I’ve done everything I can think of on my end to figure it out. It has to be a Kinja problem.
According to Ernie, no it isn’t.
I’ll say. I just cut back from reading an early posting of this week’s romantic comedy review and I was confused. Looks OK. Withholding judgment for now.
If this new homepage release is anything like the switch to kinja then I’m sure this transition will go swimmingly.
It’s okay, I still have Ernie’s email somewhere…
Works for me. I just replaced my bookmark to the homepage with a bookmark to the Latest page.
Do you have a link to the latest page? They have successfully hidden it from my doddering-old-man brain.
https://www.avclub.com/latest
Thanks.
Username/comment synergy on point.
https://www.avclub.com/latest
Nice, using that link addresses most of the issues I have with navigating the site
It fucking sucks.
Back before the kinjapocalypse, there used to be a page that listed all of the old running columns, like ‘My Year of Flops’ or ‘Inventory’ (that one is still running I believe). Like, there used to be a page that just said, ‘Interview’, ‘Random Roles’,’Inventory’,’My Year of Flops’. Does that exist anymore? Is there anything on this fancy new home page that would get me there?
We definitely can look into doing that!
If you click on or bookmark a tag, it will bring up everything with that tag.*For example, here’s “When Romance Met Comedy” and “Random Roles”.*not perfect because bloggers don’t always properly tag.
I was wondering when this layout would show up here. It’s been on The Onion for a little while now.
So long as it doesn’t migrate over to Deadspin I’m fine with it…. oh, wait…
I know this is cliche and is said evertime AV Club switches up the design…but I hate this new one.There’s way less room on the page to fit multiple stories. Like, right now when you load up the homepage you get a giant block for an anlaysis of “Love And Basketball”…and have to scroll down just to see anything else.If the problem was to show less ads, you know how to do that?? By showing less ads!Anyways, overall it sucks.
I guess the simple “newest articles first” format wasn’t getting the clicks Spanfeller wanted, so he had to make it complicated and unintuitive. Confusion clicks are still clicks. He’s gotta look like he’s doing something.
Hey, some poor web design chump got paid (one assumes). Silver linings.
I’ll let this marinate a bit before deciding how much I hate it, etc, etc.However, I did find it amusing that I had to scroll for a bit before finding the Newswire and this post explaining how stories wouldn’t get lost as often.
Phew! For a second I thought the site’s commitment to unnecessary and unwelcome redesigns might fade, but I’m glad to see it’s going strong. Have you considered adding more autoplay videos, though?
Change for the sake of change is always…change.
I’m enjoying it so far. This redesign fixes many of the complaints I had about the “Kinja-fied” AVC. In the spirit of old AVC, I’ll say that I’m “Cautiously optimistic”. If you could figure a better way to promote your older, weirder articles (“More from the A.V. Club” is a good start, but it tends to pull from more recent fare), I think you might just fill my Bingo card. And if the damn autoplaying ads are gone, I might just whitelist you guys; I only started doing it recently because it was getting so slow that my damn posts had to buffer!We first commissioned a redesign from the engineer who got Slack to work on a Super NintendoCould someone explain exactly what Slack is? Facebook but for work? Twitter with (employee) benefits?
white-collar Discord
That’s actually a big goal of ours with this new, more customizable interface. And Slack is basically AIM optimized for office work and idle chatter
The real improved webpage layout was the friends you made along the way!
In the spirit of the old AV Club you should hate it before begrudgingly getting used to it, then complain when they change things again as soon as you start to like the redesign
The old homepage put our latest stories right at the top, which was great.
Yes. Yes it was. This is visual diarrhea and I have to sift through it to find new stories.Thanks for making it harder to find what I want.
It’s an odd visual hierarchy, that’s for sure. It reminds me of the “continuous scroll” redesign that NBC news did years ago that made it virtually impossible to find anything. The whole website was just random stories with no clear over-arching organizational hierarchy. There’s a reason why “most recent first” is popular. People can do a quick scroll and see what’s been published since the last time they checked in. I’m going to change my bookmark to https://www.avclub.com/latest and probably just use that from now on. I don’t care to wade through a million different columns, scan horizonally as well as vertically, all while trying to discern what’s been published since the last time I visited.
Who authorized this shit?
This is what I see when the page first loads. Super user friendly guys, love having literally all of the page content under the fold because of a gigantic Google ad.
a cool thing you can do is scroll down
Well, this so far would seem to be significantly better than the spot.IM trial in which as I remember it several commenters died & a technical support guy went insane
Check out this guy who doesn’t have Adblock
Would it be possible to have a link to view all the latest Newswire pieces, but only those, so no “Great Job, Internet” articles or anything like that?
Otherwise I like it, and much prefer it to the old layout, so thank you for all the time and effort that’s been put in to it.
There is a newswire section of the homepage now that will have all of the latest newswires. (Below the TV Reviews section.) Click on that section’s header and it takes you to all newswires and only newswires.
Ah, didn’t spot that, but that’s great, thank you.
What’s working? What’s not? Should the need arise, we’ll update this story below with any new-homepage FAQs to ease you through this transition.Not strictly related to the homepage redesign, but the new story format where you have to click-through over a dozen pages of “content” to read & contribute to the comments (Masked Singer…review(?), I’m looking at you!) is a terrible format, particularly for ongoing coverage.
You can actually click on the comments icon on the very first slide, up by the byline, to take you directly to the comments from the first page you see. That should take you directly to the comments. If it doesn’t let me know
That’s all fine and good if all you want to do is comment generally about something, but if you want to comment on the actual content then it’s pretty awful. In fact, having to click through so many pages actively discourages people from engaging in the content. I’m sure that sort of formatting pumps up pages views or whatever bullshit metrics Jim Spanfeller likes but it is indeed pretty terrible and should be discontinued if your editorial staff has the freedom to do so.
It takes me to the first page of the click-through, and not the comments. That’s why I hate the format. (Note: Having the same issue on Chrome – my computer’s default browser – and when using Safari on my iPad.)
Hrm that’s not how it’s supposed to work, I’ll definitely have our team look into it.
Wait…have the comments been reconfigured so you can follow them like conversations?
Nope. Same format as they’ve always been since Kinja reared its ugly head.
Uuuugh. This is seriously the worst message board format of the several I am on.
That and the whole grays system is my biggest complaint, but I realize that is a whole other kettle of fish in a ball of wax.I remember the craziness that precipitated the grays system, so I understand why it was instituted. But I think someday, maybe if the internet-wide publishing business ever improves, it would be worth thinking about investing in a complete redo of Kinja comments in a much more user friendly way.
Listen, we’re lucky the site’s still here at all.
Yeah, that works for a fairly fresh article. But if the article is more than five hours old or so, you can’t see comments in Firefox. Chrome seems to work, but Chrome, bleh.
I didn’t know what you were talking about so I checked out that Masked Singer post, and I agree it’s a pretty awful design. And the problem with quick click to the comments is happening for me in both Chrome and Firefox (it actually loads the #replies link, but that just points to slide one).
My only gripe is that this story is already kind of buried on the new homepage. I do like that there’s a “latest” tab so I can see just what’s been updated since my last visit.
I have never encountered a single person who prefers this BS to simple chronological order, why does every bloody website try forcing it on people?
I like that there are sections again. TV/Movie/Music Reviews are easier to find now. I’m sure I’ll get used to it. (Trying to be less reactionary for Lent.)
I won’t know until a full season of a show drops, but so far I like the design for one simple fact: it looks like it might limit the number of review articles for streaming series to just one section. For instance, I won’t have to scroll through eight Sabrina reviews (plus the “We’re Reviewing Sabrina” consolidated post).
that was definitely one of the goals of this change
Thank you very much.
Is it really reviewing if you binge-watch it over the weekend and write blog posts in the same time-frame?
It’s way too busy
I just wanted to thank you for including the “Latest” feature. New redesigns are great and all, but lots of us just like to do a quick scan to see what’s new, and chronological layouts make that much easier. If the only option were the new layout, I would probably find myself spending less time on the site because I don’t really want to wade through all of the new columns figuring out what’s new and what’s not. I prefer to just do a quick scan through a chronological feed, so thanks for keeping that as an option for us.
I like it
What? Visit a site’s home page to see what’s changed, like some kind of barbarian? I just have the AVC’s RSS feed and I get everything there. I barely even know what the home page looks like; I literally hit the home page once or twice a year, usually when I’m drunk and accidentally click on the masthead logo.
My first thought was “Goddammit, everything changed” and my second thought was “Actually, this looks all right”
I’m not sure why having the feature story take up the whole screen is better, but what is an improvement is I can either go straight to “Latest” or I can click the “Newswire” link above a Newswire story and go straight to the page where there is only that…it would still nice to just have Newswire in the goddamn header but I guess Latest is fine. I still don’t get why TV Reviews and TV Club are separate when you have to go through another screen to get to Movie Reviews AND Music Reviews, just have a fucking drop down list under “Reviews.”I also echo that even if it is under AUX reached through “And More” instead of the main list, there should be a “Features” link the way there used to be to get to Block & Tackle, When Romance Met Comedy, Random Roles, Inventory, etc.
These are all things we actually are working on tweaking. (Except the “Latest” vs “Newswire,” but can take that under advisement.) Apparently you should come work for us.
Isn’t that what we commentarians basically do?I am pretty puzzled why when NYTimes and other places are redesigning to have more content immediately accessible upon the page loading, AV Club has gone “we’re not only going to make you scroll, we’re going to make you scroll a page and a half even to read the caption on the main story taking up your whole goddamn screen! Not only that, it is going to continue slowly loading and move the picture even lower on your screen, running away from you so there is a three inch dead zone, enticing and tantalizing you by not letting you read a single word! MYSTERY!!!!!”
I hate the re-design.
Not a fan myself. I once frequented a site called Topless Robot (Sci fi I swear!) that adopted a very similar design. I stopped visiting it shortly thereafter.
And for god’s sake, restore the “show selector” to the TV Club main page!
While we’re on to things we hate about the new re-design…something that drives me just ever so slightly crazy is having a few newswire articles right under “The Big Story” (for instance as of this typing its about Conovirus canleactions, Y: The Last Man casting updates etc)…then having those same exact 3-4 stories pop up again about alfway down the page.It’s hard to see how this is to the readers benefit, and honestly just makes visiting the site less fun.Also also…please make sure movie reviews aren’t lost in the shuffle. Its my favorite part of the AV Club.
This basically matches my feelings. Could do with the Big Story being a little smaller but generally like the new design, really wish there was a Features link to all the longer form material. (And not to turn this into another Lamenting The Past post but wish there was still more of that stuff)
Don’t worry, most things—including the comments section—remain the same.BUT THAT’S WHAT WE WANTED YOU TO FIXSeriously, though, I like it. Much neater and organized. Now if you’ll tend to the rest of the request list I faxed you (firing Barsanti, perma-banning Gargasmell, eliminating gray commenters, selling the entire company back to The Onion), we can get down to business.That teacup puppy needs to be nuked from orbit, but ONLY after he eats a tiny scoop of liver pate from my hand. <3
Sure why not
Well this new look is hot garbage, but other than that…… everything is great!
Kill it with fire. This is awful.
it’s awful.
Keeping the best posts of the day at the top is great and all, but a chronological feed is better. I’m not a fan of having to click an extra button to get there. Kinja’s already making me click way too many times just to expand the comment section.Say, while we’re on the subject of site improvements, I have an idea to for list posts like AVQ&As. Could you guys headline each entry with the actual name of the movie/episode/song being discussed instead of the contributor’s name? It’s still good to know which author is speaking, but those posts would read a lot better with more descriptive sub-headers.
At least it doesn’t crash and completely fail to load as frequently?
If there’s a vote for Review layouts, I vote for the columns of the movie review section over the rows of the TV reviews. And maybe fit a second review in the third column.
Patrick, does this update do anything to address any of the annoying technical glitches that are common across Kinja sites? For example, when a comments section just doesn’t load for an article even if you refresh a dozen times, or when scrolling down a page too far automatically loads the next published article?And just to make sure I’m not too much of a kvetch, thank you all for your hard work on this and for your day job of putting out interesting content.
We are definitely working on that commenting craziness, which occurs when we use the site… so I know firsthand how annoying it is. But in general they’re telling us this redesign should load pages 20% faster
And to add to Bart’s point: comments definitely go bonkers in Firefox. You have to refresh a few times to load if at all, and it looks scrambled when it does.
I supposed the train has left the station on using something other than Kinja for commenting?
We are definitely working on that commenting craziness, which occurs
when we use the site… so I know firsthand how annoying it is.
And yet it’s been a problem for a long, long, long timem.
Is there a “bug find” comment that I can post on? Found a bug using IE which isn’t there when using Safari and Chrome.
If someone already posted this, my apologies, the link to expand the replies isn’t working. But to my opinion, I’d rather have 100% functional over 20% faster any and every day of the week.
As your migrating old Inventory, A to Z, and other list format articles into slideshows (when did we go back to 2004?) could you find a way to include a Show All button or a way to go straight to the comments? Clicking the word bubble icon doesn’t do anything.
I keep getting “Post Save Failed” for moths when I try to post comments using the mobile site. It’s been that way for months and well before they did the update.
Patrick, does this update do anything to address any of the annoying technical glitches that are common across Kinja sites?
Of course not. That would require forethought & effort.
When I view the site in Chrome, there’s a large empty margin on the left side of the browser, and the content continues off the right side, but I can’t scroll over. Noticed this too on the Onion site when it switched.
Great! Now just add more episodic reviews, less tabloid clickbait newswire articles, get rid of the kinja comment section and go back to Disqus (never thought I’d say that) or something better, and we’ll be halfway there.Outside of that, it is aesthetically pleasing, I guess.
Just a shitty as this entire site has become inside and out. Congrats!
That’s great now drop Kinja.
New issue: The jumbotron thing is stupid. It means we can only see one item of (potential) interest.Ongoing issues: I’ve never understood why there is not a prominent link to “What’s On Tonight?” on the front page. It’s one of the few features that a reader might want to read every day. Also, the incremental loading of comments is too incremental. I get that some paging might be necessary but for any marginally lengthy thread I have to click “Load More Comments” until my fingers bleed.
I’m glad for the “latest” option, because that’s usually the only reason I come to the AV Club homepage (usually I get to AV Club articles either through Twitter or through my RSS feed for it).
That puppy is extremely adorable but I feel like dogs that small (smol) shouldn’t really exist – they’re bred to be teeny-tiny and it’s bad for their health.
Plus it’s basically an ad for the breeder, with their watermark in the lower left. Aesthetic breeding is gross, teacup breeders doubly so.
I didn’t notice that at first but you are correct.
Well, sort of correct. It’s actually in the lower right of the video. Just to be pedantic about it, lol.
Maybe next they can fix things so I can actually see the comments in Firefox if the article is more than four hours old.
I find it much harder to read than before, but I’ve found myself having a lot of attention problems when I try to focus on multiple pieces of text at once. I don’t know if it’s my brain being so retrained to only look at a phone layout, or what.
In all this time, with all these iterations, and all the feedback all these types of sites have received over “improvements” that are anything but, designers seemingly never learn.People prefer chronological feeds, unfiltered, with the newest/latest first. The further you deviate from that, the less people will like it. For examples, I don’t know, just look at every site that changed from that format to anything else over the past thirty years.If the front page is going to remain a cluttered, virtually unnavigable trash pile, fine. Just don’t change /latest.
Is “Latest” a full chronological feed?Because if it isn’t, then this site is now more trouble than it’s worth.
It is a full chron feed
Then where’s my Houston news?
As a native Houstonian I actually get this joke
Thanks, that’s much appreciated
Personally that’s the style I prefer for the home page, but I’m glad the chrono option remains, so I can’t get very bothered to be honest.
That was my first concern, too. Found the button. Crisis averted.
“but we are the same A.V. Club you have known (and hopefully loved) for eons”[Thor squint]
Yeahhhh, bye.
My eyes! The goggles do nothing!
This seems like a step in the right direction. I look forward to continued improvements. I think the Featured Story at top is unnecessarily big though. Maybe scale that down a bit. One other thing, and it might be just a Kinja problem that’s out of this topical area, is for months I’ve had to constantly refresh the page multiple times to get the comment section to load correctly. It started happening around the same time the site implemented the auto-play videos. I don’t know if there’s a causation there but just noting it. I’ve seen plenty of others mention the problem as well so maybe have someone look into that. (I’m on Firefox if that matters)
This seems like a step in the right direction. I look forward to continued improvements. I think the Featured Story at top is unnecessarily big though. Maybe scale that down a bit. One other thing, and it might be just a Kinja problem that’s out of this topical area, is for months I’ve had to constantly refresh the page multiple times to get the comment section to load correctly. It started happening around the same time the site implemented the auto-play videos. I don’t know if there’s a causation there but just noting it. I’ve seen plenty of others mention the problem as well so maybe have someone look into that. (I’m on Firefox if that matters)
I’m obligated by internet law to angrily say that I’ve been an AVC commenter for many years and this latest redesign is literally Hitler and I’ll take my business elsewhere…. but… ah hell, I like it. Besides, there’s Latest, so I literally can’t complain.It’s not perfect, but it works for me.
*glances out from my RSS feed*There’s a homepage?
So what you have done is added an extra click for people like me to get to just a chron list of the stories I can scroll through until I see stories I’ve already read so I know I’m caught up. Just by the stories you choose you are curating enough. Curating what you’ve curated is just annoying and pointless. I’ll make the extra click but improving on something that was just fine is a disease.
Don’t worry, most things—including the comments section—remain the same.I know I speak for… well, no one, when I say thank god kinja remains untouched!
Oh shit. Not this again!
Are we now forever without the ability to see the number of comments on an article before clicking through to read it? That would be a negative for me; I often click into an article I otherwise wouldn’t be interested in only because it looks like there’s been a lively discussion in the comments.
I’m sorry, this all looks like an improvement, but it is not officially an AVC redesign until it all implodes and we come up with a nifty “apocalypse” moniker.
And did you preemptively pay Ernie for overtime?
Ernie doesn’t get paid. He’s an emotional vampire who feeds off the confusion and anger of others. Working for Kinja keeps him very happy.
Bug report: The “latest” link on this very page (and presumably, all non-home pages) is still pointing to the home page. Looks like it’s only correct on the home page itself.
Thanks for flagging. We’ll look into it
While you’re looking into that, perhaps look into putting everything back the way it was, before yall made my eyes bleed with this ugly fucking site.
Thanks for flagging. We’ll look into it
Try doing that before going live, next time.
Came to say the same thing. Not good when most of the times I want to go the latest.
Anything that keeps a Will Harris Random Roles interview from being buried within a half of a day of it posting. Seriously, those things should stay on the top fold for a week.
There should be a little fanfare that plays on the homepage whenever one of those drops. Maybe some of that confetti you get when you send a “congratulations” text on an iPhone as well.
We now present to you “Change for no reason other than change itself”.
Don’t worry, most things—including the comments section—remain the same.
And you say this like this is a good thing…
The header image is apt. This redesign is unnecessary at best & too cluttered at worst. I’ll try to avoid Home & go right to Latest now. I would’ve preferred the Kinja commenting glitches to be fixed instead.
This article sounds like it was written by someone in HR who thinks they’re way funnier and more clever than they actually are.
I don’t think it’s necessary. FWIW
much, much better than the stock kinja format. still not a fan of the guts of this platform, but it’s a massive improvement.
The huge oversized novelty like about ‘Love and Basketball’ may be the end of this for me. Odd and Sad at the same time.
So, Kinja stays? Oh thank god! *said nobody*
I can’t stand the endless scroll design, so I’m in favor of this. Looks a little more like the old AVC, which comforts me in my half-alive senescent state.
This is how you lose readers, by making your website fucking hideous and useless. This is why nobody goes to windowscentral or androidcentral anymore.
No sir, I don’t like it
I don’t like it…the whole first “page” for me now is just the giant header image with a giant blank space above it (probably an ad that gets blocked).
Here ya go, welcome to your new A/V club:
The main story is approximately 1368710357 times too large. Other than that, not too bad.
What in the blue hell is this clusterfuck of information on the main page that just tried to enter my eyes? More =/= better in every circumstance.
Also, two things in regard to the video pages – 1) Can you PLEASE turn off the autoplay feature? It is profoundly annoying.2) Can you get rid of the Continue Reading button? It’s needless, and only necessitates one more useless click to get to your comment and/or the content.Thank you.p.s. fire barsanti.
I’ll use latest, I’m an olde and prefer chrono vertical reading.
Kill the autoplay, it makes me move off the site as soon as I see/hear it. I know I’m somewhat alone in this, but press junket interviews are 4th/5th circle of hell watchable. Make sure those are hidden somewhere far away.
I will definitely only be using the latest tab. The main page design is just too much stuff thrown everywhere.
This is different and therefore stress-inducing, but it looks like it might actually be a good thing once that part of my brain that goes “NO NO NO NO” in the face of change quiets down. It looks decently organized and somehow conveys more information without being too cluttered.
So far, for me, this new look has been extremely buggy. Modules and articles are overlapping each other in the layout to the point where I can’t even tell what the headline(s) are, clicking on articles sometimes loads them and other times loads the ads but not the actual content. Clicking on “Latest” seemed to bring me to the home page with no discernable difference. Personally, I miss the old homepage so far, but change isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’m holding off judgement until the bugs have been ironed out but for now the site is essentially unreadable for me.
This looks nice, how do I get ungrayed?
I’ve been hanging around these parts long enough that this feels less like a “redesign” and more like a “tossing out the previous redesign and going back to the redesign before that.”
By which I mean: OMFGthankyouFINALLY.
Ok, I happen to have about 23 years experience in web design and development, so pardon me while my Critical Pro eye rolls over this thing. It’s really your own fault for allowing comments :)Your visual hierarchy doesn’t make any sense. “The Big Story” takes up pretty much the entire front page such that I have to scroll to see much of anything else. That’s ok enough, I guess as it’s the “big” story, but that sets up the expectation that size connotes relative importance. So when you scroll down, you get another section that’s three columns – Features, Reviews, and News. However, the sizes go from large for Features, medium for Reviews, to small for News. Since our first experience with the site is the existence of giant for “Big Story’, that means you’ll naturally draw the conclusion ‘Features’ are important, Reviews less so, and News the least important. But THEN you go and confuse all that by making the lesser Features smaller than Reviews but bigger than News. My eyes are drawn to Features because in the Western world we read left to right and largest to smallest. What am I supposed to take from that visual hierarchy? It clearly wants to use relative size to say something but then it’s inconsistent in what it says.Then we get some really weird organization that doesn’t make sense. All the stuff I mentioned above ends with a single horizontal line across the page… if I’d guess that’s 1-1.5pts thick. The different sections have lines separating them that are lighter… .75pts maybe? So that tells me those things are ‘together’ as a unit. That’s good. Then I scroll down and see another section – Videos – which is all well and good, followed by Best Deals of the Day, yet another section. Great, no problems there. Suddenly I see another section like the ones before and the first thing I see is a picture I already saw once already. So this must be redundant material and I can ignore it, right? Well no, there’s stuff under there that wasn’t there before, but I can’t ‘see’ that unless I really start to compare the specific items. That’s when you realize the first ‘section’ isn’t a section at all, it’s an aggregator. Then why does it look like its own ‘section’ and not something else, which is what it is? That doesn’t make sense. Then throw in all the “View All” and “Show All” links that take you to what behave like separate pages and the whole site starts to seem really confused. I think you need to ditch the redundancy stuff and just present each section in its own right.
Yeah… no.
Your site redesign sucks!
The New A.V. Club or wherever pop culture criticism goes to die a quiet death
I like the redesign–it at least looks more like old AV Club. Kinja is still bad tho. But more importantly: are you cutting music coverage? I see the music tab up there but I don’t see anything added in the past week.
While it was easy enough to reset my bookmark to /latest, there’s a definite learning curve to keep from clicking the AVclub banner to reload the site.My instinct is to click it, but that mostly brings up a still from an old film.
The feature story + ad really screws you over on a 13″ screen. Other than that everything looks pretty tidy. As a completionist I’ll still use Latest as my “homepage” however.
As Mr. Horse said, “No, sir, I don’t like it.”
Don’t worry, most things—including the comments section—remain the same.
Thank goodness we’ve maintained the only part of the site that actually needed fixing: the comments system that actively dissuades people from participating in discussions via a punishingly impossible approval process!I have no beef with the redesign. I fear change, but I’ll get used to it, but I’ve been commenting here for YEARS without ever getting out of the greys and it really feels like this energy could have been refocused on an actually consistently bad aspect of the user experience, rather than a shiny new homepage.
Not to disappoint anyone, but I, er… kinda like it?
These deck chairs have been rearranged most expertly, Titanic’s Chief Deck Chair Rearranger.
Amazingly wonderful redesign! Speaking of comments section can I stop being in the grays after years of posting please?
it’s real bad. i hope the other sites don’t follow suit…
The “News” tab on the rightmost side of the under-the-header tabs look too cluttered for me, like I’d miss something if I’m not carefully parsing the list one by one.
Well, it sucks. But anything after Kinja is just a slow death anyway.
It reminds me a little of the good old days, before it was folded into the ruined debris of the Gawker-verse, when AV Club was purposefully organized, like, at all, instead of being chained to the default bricolage of random cultural ephemera format dictated by association with the Kinja platform.
Is there any chance that the inability to login (via fb or twitter) for Safari users on MacOS 10.16 will ever be addressed? It would be great if I didn’t have to have two different browsers open (one for everything else, and one for Kinja sites).
I’ve brought this up with the team. I’m hoping it’s something we can fix
Thanks so much, let’s hope.
This was a problem for me too. This seemed to solve it https://kinja.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360010705794-Login-Difficulty-with-Safari-on-MacOS-and-iOS
Thanks for this! When I updated to the newest version of Safari it wasn’t working, and this fix didn’t work. However, now it works. Yay!
Looks good. Any plans to bring back community grades?
The new tiled layout has an added bonus of making it significantly easier to stick sponsored content and straight up ads in the middle of the information field, making it harder to filter out.
So harder to navigate, harder to absorb, and all for the purpose of being more ad-friendly on mobile devices. Gotcha.
Very happy to see this! The endless scroll blog format never seemed quite right for AVClub. I hope this leads to bringing back more recurring columns and features and that those columns get highlighted somewhere. Do you even still do 10 questions and Random Roles? I feel like I must miss them in the endless scroll if you do.
We definitely do and are making an effort to highlight both new and old ones with this new layout. Here’s where you can find them all in one place though!
https://www.avclub.com/tag/random-roles
https://www.avclub.com/c/interview/11-questions
you can’t blame a site for trying to keep things fresh
The mobile view is truly, remarkably bad. A few images at the top, then nothing but a long string of headlines without preview snippets to tell me what I’m looking at. It’s the opposite of usability. “Fresh look” is one thing; “significantly worse than before” is something else entirely.
Don’t worry, most things—including the comments section—remain the same.But the comments are the part I don’t want the same!
“I hate change!” you may protest.
I’m all for change, provided it’s for the better and not just for the sake of change. I don’t think the new look is better.
Are the videos blocking 2/3s of the articles (looks like a column of videos on top of the articles column) a new feature so I can only see a portion of the headlines a new feature?
Like Paula Abdul (Straight up) – Your featured story takes up too much screen real estate. It needs to span only two columns.You can either use the third column to move up the News panel or, I dunno, run more of those terrible ads you never vet. Something with an autoplay video I assume.
Looks good. I see none of the other GMG sites have this look (yet).I still can’t log in using Safari browser in iOS unless I go to private mode, though. I’d like to be able to stay logged in on the regular browser instead having to re-enter my password every time.
I appreciate the general direction, but to me it’s just so busy looking. I think 3 columns is too many right at the start.
I like that the TV reviews are more prominent now.Now to increase the amount of actual TV reviews…
I like it. Reminds me of magazine.
Am down to try a new format, thanks!Request: would it be possible to build towards a section that allows visitors to see the AVClub’s highest rated content (in any media format)? I realize you have annual “best of” lists, but it’d be helpful to see that across multiple years.(context: am a parent who can’t keep up with popular culture anymore, so am most interested in seeing what the AVClub rates in the A to B+ range among movies, music, books, etc. over say the past 5 years)Thanks again!
Still with the autoplay videos, though. Give us a break already
I found this article after scrolling through all of the content before it, so I can say it did its job. The general feel of the new layout does feel a lot less tedious to me without worrying that I might miss something. Nice work.Hopefully the large marquee images, which I dig, doesn’t strain the folks who might have slow internet.
This looks remarkably like the AvClub design pre-Kinja.
Yet another HTML abortion courtesy of Kinja, fuck you people.
Couple things:
– Any chance of getting a user-grade system put back on reviews, like there used to be pre-Kinja?
– PLEASE knock it off with the autoplaying videos. I don’t care that they’re muted, they’re annoying to have in my peripheral vision and unnecessarily use up mobile data.
Don’t worry, most things—including the comments section—remain the same.That’s a shame, because the comments could use a lot of work. I know you guys had to switch to Kinja for your content, and that the Kinja commenting system was part of the package deal, but Disqus was waaaaaaaay better. Reply notifications are utterly meaningless (you can’t see what the reply is or what comment they’re replying to, without following the hyperlink to the article, which only *sometimes* jumps to the correct comment). Scrolling the comments within an article is a nightmare when there are a lot – the collapsing and expanding is arbitrary, and it isn’t paginated to be able to let you scrub ahead. You just get to keep scrolling down and down and down and down and down hoping to find a comment thread you were looking for.
Are we still sticking with Kinja? And what happened to Ernie? Was he sacrificed to the gods of the redesign?
I really hate this new homepage. It’s too busy & cluttered, and it’s already resulted in me curtailing my reading here.
I will always be partial to the 2013 era page. I know it is a place in time that no site is going back to thanks to tablets and phones, but the density of content vs white space, made things seem important, like you could spend all day updating yourself. I reckon there is the same amount of content now, just buried behind a lot of scrolling.https://web.archive.org/web/20130208070354/http://www.avclub.com/
Since many ask questions about glitches – how is it that I can’t log in to this site with Twitter, and only manage to with Google? And since I’m starred here, I’d rather not attempt to comment with my Twitter login anyway… unless some bright mind around here can tell me how to “merge” my two logins?