Smashing Magazine’s Redesign and Smashing Network

• By Smashing Editorial Team
• October 31st, 2009
• Redesign, Smashing Magazine
• 464 Comments

Something has changed here today. Smashing Magazine has shaped up. We know that extensive design changes usually create a split echo: some readers are happy and appreciate the additional features and benefits, while others don’t want to see anything change because they’re comfortable in their old habits. However, publishers have to update their websites from time to time to improve the user experience and add new features. And that day has come for Smashing Magazine.

Wet Paint!

Smashing Magazine’s redesign was done by Liam McKay and his design agency, WeFunction. We also tweaked a couple of things in the design. Footer and sidebar illustrations were designed by Pasquale D’Silva. Smashing Magazine may look a bit different at first glance, but keeping the general structure intact was very important to us. After all, we don’t want to confuse our readers; rather, we want their experience to improve.

So, minor details aside, what exactly has changed on Smashing Magazine? Here’s a summary:

• You can now visit pages of our regular authors (e.g. Kayla Knight). There, you’ll find information about them, see an overview of their posts on Smashing Magazine and follow their Twitter stream. You can also visit a page that lists all of our regular authors.
• You can now rate articles on Smashing Magazine (in the comments area of each post). The highest-rated and most-commented articles are displayed on the post’s category page (e.g. Graphics). And you can find an overview of our categories on the All Categories page.
• You can now leave threaded replies to comments. Pages that have a huge number of comments are now paginated.
• User-submitted design news now appears in the widget on the right side. This news is pulled from our sister website, Noupe. Everyone can submit news, which lands in the moderation queue and is manually approved by our moderators.
• This sidebar widget also features recent jobs and the latest Smashing Forum entries.
• We have re-organized our tags, removed duplicates and replaced some of them with more meaningful labels. You can now use our Tag Explorer (the “Popular tags” link at the top of the page) to navigate Smashing Magazine.

And Then There Is The Network

If you’ve already had a look at the new front page, you would have found some changes there, too: not just recent Smashing Magazine posts, but contributions from other design magazines. That’s because we’ve teamed up with 18 other magazines to house a productive and comprehensive meeting place for designers and developers, showcasing truly the best content around. Among those joining the game are Webdesigner Depot, Noupe, SixRevisions, UX Booth, Hongkiat, ThinkVitamin, Web Designer Wall, Designm.ag, Boagworld and Speckyboy. We call it the Smashing Network.

• The idea behind the network is to promote high-quality content on the Web design scene and to make it worthwhile for publishers to produce useful and interesting design-related articles. We want our community to benefit from these articles and support the publishers with direct traffic from the Smashing Magazine.
• Our main RSS feed (the one you are subscribed to) will not automatically contain excerpts of posts from our network members. We will have a separate SM network feed for that.

In fact, every network member has its very own channel on Smashing Magazine, with recent posts and Twitter updates. All content is manually approved and promoted on the network — no automation at all. So, you can be sure you’ll get only the best articles.

Needless to say, we will still be publishing our own insightful articles, which you can always find on our front page. The last article always appears at the top, with older posts clearly highlighted in a black box among the other SM network posts.

We are aware that this huge change will lead to misunderstandings and may cause problems at first. But we are certain it was the right decision and that everyone will benefit from it. If you prefer the old version of Smashing Magazine (the one without the posts from our network), you can use the Smashing Magazine’s channel page, which is exactly the same as our front page before the redesign. Or just stick to our main RSS feed, which contains only Smashing Magazine’s posts.

Want To Join The Network?

The main requirement for membership in our content network is that you regularly publish high-quality content on your blog or magazine. You don’t have to be popular or have a lot of traffic; you could be just starting out. You can apply for membership by sending an email to network@smashingmagazine.com. We will be reviewing membership periodically, so please be patient and stay tuned for updates.

What Do You Think?

This redesign is work in progress. Your opinion is very important to us. The design definitely could use some changes and we are willing to improve it with your help. Of course, we may have missed something. Have you found any mistakes, bugs, errors or problems yet?

And what do you think of the whole thing? We are open to your suggestions, ideas and criticism. Please let us know what you think in the comments to this post!

(sl), (vf), (al)