Welcome to the new Greater Greater Washington

As you can see (unless you are reading via RSS), the redesigned Greater Greater Washington is now live.

What’s new:

• A few major recent articles are highlighted at the top of the page.
• Instead of colored swooshes at the top left of each article, there a little “flag” denoting the major subject area of the article.
• When you click on “Read more…” in an article, if you have Javascript enabled, it will add the rest of the article inline. If Javascript is disabled, you should still go to the page with the full article.
• The text is not as small and there’s more spacing between lines.
• The portion before the “read more…” is now shorter, requiring less scrolling to see different articles.
• The “Share” widget now uses Javascript as well so you can roll over the little blue plus and send articles around via Twitter, Google Reader, Facebook, etc.
• The first sentence or two of each article appears in larger type to highlight it.
• There are now two sidebars, containing links to more content.
• The “Greater How?” area highlights the major subject areas we cover.
• The projects area lists the major projects going on in the region, with links to our articles about them.
• The stylized map of the region links to articles about each jurisdiction.
• There’s now a Streetsblog widget linking to major articles in other urbanist blogs in the Streetsblog Network.
• A SeeClickFix area shows the latest issues around the region reported to local government using SeeClickFix.

Many of you raised concerns or pointed out flaws in the earlier iterations. I’ve fixed some of these, including:

• I moved the left (content) area to come first in the HTML files. That way, users on slow mobile devices and/or browsers like Blackberries that can’t handle floating elements properly will see the content before the sidebars. Thanks James. (Since I just made this change, please let me know if this breaks in your browser.)
• The original version had only three major current issues in the “Greater How?” area, but that gave the erroneous impression that those are the only areas the region could be greater. For that reason, I rearranged that area to now show seven expandable areas. Education and public safety still just get one section since we don’t write about it as much, but they get their own section to reflect that these issues are an important part of making a greater Greater Washington nonetheless. Thanks Ward 1 Guy.
• For those of you without Segoe UI (which comes with newer versions of MS Office), the font is back to Trebuchet MS, the font on the old site. Thanks kincredible, Laurence Aurbach, BeyondDC and others.
• I’ve added Falls Church and Fairfax City to the map. Thanks Ian Valentine.

There are also some suggestions we decided not to implement. I want to explain why.

Some of you said that you feel the new design duplicates navigation. There are now multiple ways to get at some of the tags, with the “Greater How?” categories, the tag cloud, and others. Recent posts now appear in the main content area, with some also at the top in the featured boxes, and the sidebar includes the latest batch of links. These changes will help the readers who don’t look at the site every single day, or new visitors.

The classic “reverse chronological list of posts” design works great if you look at the site all the time, but someone just coming by might see only one or two posts that aren’t especially the most exciting ones ever, and not necessarily get a sense of the site, of what we’re about, or what kind of content we have. By providing more context, we can orient them. Items like the map and the projects will help new users find the content that’s relevant to the areas where they live, for example. I, and most of you who read all the time, are well aware of what we’ve said about, say, Alexandria, Petworth, or Laurel, but someone from those areas visiting for the first time wouldn’t be easily able to find it.

I understand that two sidebars seems a little unbalanced at first. I think you will get used to it, as I did after originally being unsure. Two sidebars confers a huge advantage in allowing for more content to go on the side. If we ever need to put in ads, there would be room as well, though right now I’m not planning to add them.

As for the sidebar placement, user interface research shows that people see most of all the content on the left, which is why the articles are on the left. It also tells us that people have a tougher time reading long lines of text, which is why newspapers and magazines have always broken text into columns (and much narrower ones than these, at that). The larger type along with the shorter line lengths will be particularly helpful for users less familiar with reading lots of text on a computer and users who are a little bit older, but should be better for everyone.

The trick with user interface design, or any other changes to a successful piece of software, is to remove the obstacles to new or occasional users without actually harming the user experience for the most important users, the frequent ones. The contributors started using this design as our main one some time ago, and I definitely found that after some time I enjoyed reading much more on the new site than the old. I hope you will feel the same. However, we’ll check back in after a few weeks to see how you all feel about the changes.

If you really want to keep reading on the old design, it will remain up at least for a while at http://odd.greatergreaterwashington.org/.

In the meantime, please continue to point out any issues you might notice. In particular, if you find a broken link or get an error page, please alert me. You also may well identify a good way to improve the sidebars or other design elements, so please keep the suggestions and reactions coming. And, as always, thanks for reading and commenting!