Back in January Jason announced that he was leaving Technorati to focus on Metroblogging and I said I’d be following shortly. Basically we had way too much Metblogs work to do and not enough time to do it. The past month has been filled with that and we’re excited to show off the first chunk of a long line of new stuff - a full redesign of the Metroblogging network city sites. I could tell you all about it (actually I will) but you should go check it out first. Take a look at our first city, Los Angeles, or our newest city Dublin. Or if you want something closer, check out any one of the 42+ others we have around the world.

Since just about every detail on the sites have been messed with, and it would take a research paper to explain them all, I’m just going to point out a few of my favorites. The most obvious change is the color shift. With so many of our authors posting amazing images (we felt that the previous page design was overpowering them in many cases), the new mostly grey-scale sites will now really help keep the focus on those images. Also, knowing people are coming to our sites for the content, we’ve made the posts themselves easier to read. All that said, one thing I’ve learned from designing websites for 10+ years is that no matter what you do, someone will hate it. So design-wise, this is all I’m gonna say. We love it, and hope you do to (if not we’ve set up [email protected] where you can send your “advice” to).

In regards to features - check out that line of icons under the posts. There are a bunch of new options there which will make sorting, finding, and keeping track of things much easier. With a growing audience whose primary language is not English, we hope the icons will help make figuring out how to do those things much easier as well. We also decided that a lot of the navigation options were simply taking up space so we tucked them away into those little pop-open slots on the right side of the screen. If you want it, it’s there - if not, you don’t have to look at it. Additionally, we have moved the flickr group photos to the right side and we are in the process of opening all those groups up for public contributions. That should be finished later this week.

One new feature in the navigation that I do want to highlight is the mobile versions of all of the city sites. We’ve been working with the fine folks over at WINKsite to put together a full-blown mobile version of our entire network. There’s a desktop emulator link so you can see how it looks from your computer or you can just fire up a mobile browser and head over to http://cityname.metblogs.com/mobile/ and check it out on your phone. With any luck your days of being bored waiting in line are now over.

Anyway, what I’ve just mentioned is the tip of the iceberg - Metblogs has more on the way. Stay tuned, as I said last month, things are about to get really exciting.

This entry was written by Sean Bonner and posted on Monday, February 20th, 2006 at 7:19 am and is filed under Announcements, Metblogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.