Welcome To The New Jezebel

By Jessica Coen  |  February 7, 2011 | 11:50am
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It’s an ambush makeover! Kathie Lee and Hoda grabbed Jezebel from Rockefeller Plaza, Louis Licari had at us, and now it’s time for the big reveal. Splashy, huh?

So here’s our new look. Most of the page is dedicated to one big story, and you’ve got a list of today’s headlines in a column down the right side of the page. The page is a lot simpler and lighter, which means it will load quickly. And at last we have a way to display big, gorgeous images and videos on the front page of our site. You can get your Ryan Gosling super-sized.

We realize that things have changed, oh, a ton, so let’s figure out how to use this thing.


This handy video demonstrates a lot of the redesign’s bells and whistles, which we’ll go into below.

How to scan through stories

When you come to Jezebel, usually you want to scan through a lot of stories at once. Now you have two ways to do that: Flipping through pages and scrolling through headlines.

If you like the experience of flipping through stories and glancing over the full text, video, and pictures for each one, you’ll want to use our “next post” button. It’s on the left side of the navigation bar at the very bottom of the your browser window. Clicking it takes you through the day’s stories one at a time.

If you’d rather just scroll through headlines, you can use your scroll button or up/down arrow keys to move through the stories in the right-hand column, which are displayed in classic, bloggy, reverse-chronological order. Just move your mouse over that area in order to scroll through those headlines. There is also a “next headlines” button at the bottom of that column, for even quicker scanning.

At the top of the right-hand column, you’ll see three icons: A house, a flame, and a magnifying glass. Click the house (home) if you want to see today’s stories. Click the flame for today’s most popular stories. Click the glass for search.

What’s in it for commenters?

If you’re a regular reader and commenter, you’ll notice right away that the site is lighter and faster. Just click on a headline if you’d like to read the story. The headlines will stay with you in the right-hand column no matter what story you’re reading. No more clicking back to the front page when you’re done reading a story. When you’re done reading a post, you can go back to scrolling through the day’s headlines, or start flipping through stories one at a time.

There’s also a big, generous space for your comments now. That means your commenter name is bigger. Your avatar is bigger. Your comments are BIG. And now there’s more space for pictures and videos you’ve uploaded. Your GIF dance parties are going from Junior Prom to Governor’s Ball.

You’ll also find that it’s easier to change comment settings. The big navigation bar at the top of the comments section makes it simple to choose whether you’d like to see all comments or just one featured comment thread. (The featured thread is the default view.)

Comment forums will also be much more readable and flexible, but the address you’ll use to find them has changed. So if you want to head over to Groupthink, where you go to talk about pretty much anything a human being can talk about:

http://jezebel.com/groupthink/for…

Same goes for any other forum you want to reach:

http://jezebel.com/tips/forum
http://jezebel.com/meetup/forum
http://jezebel.com/move/forum

And so on, and so forth.

Right now these forums may be buggy — we’re aware that there are problems, and our tech teams in the U.S. and Hungary (yes, Hungary — keep an eye out for intermittent and accidental tech-code bursts of Hunglish!) will be working very hard this week to hold things together and fix what needs fixin’.

Why did you do this to me? Change is scary! I hate change!

We wanted to make the front page lighter and simpler to scan, while also emphasizing big feature stories that we’ve written. Truth is, we spend a lot of time creating original stuff for Jezebel — but eventually those features would get lost in the interminably long scroll of the blog. But with our new design, we can splash them as big as we want (and not sacrifice load time).

For a more in-depth explanation as to why we’ve had this redesign, you can read this post by Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton. (Gawker Media is Jezebel’s parent company; Denton is Daddy Warbucks, but without the hugs.)

If you want to resist change, you can always view the blog via the Blog View, which gives you something more like the way the old site looked. And you can still read Jezebel via RSS, of course.

Something is wrong! Something is amazing! Who do I contact?

If you find something buggy or broken, you can mail [email protected] to get answers. Somebody will be responding to your concerns at that address 24 hours a day. If you just want to tell us what you think of the site, you can mail [email protected]. Or hop on over to the Redesign Forum and say what’s on your mind.

 
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