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Site Redesign - June 2013

We spent over 6 months working on the latest redesign of the sites. There have been a lot of changes and iterations during the design and development process. Our primary goal was to make the site easier to use while providing you more control in fine tuning page results. We’ll spare you the gory details behind each design and implementation decision and just give you the highlights and benefits of the new design.

 Infinite scrolling, pagination and sticky navigation bar

  • Introduced endless scrolling (down and up) on most devices and hybrid infinite scroll on some browsers (Safari)
  • Created a page counter so you know how many pages deep you’ve gone
  • Kept the ability to jump to any page in pagination
  • Implemented a sticky nav bar so there’s constant access to navigation, search, filters and pagination

image

 

Sort and filter any page

  • Added the ability to sort and filter every page of the site (homepage, search results, category, submitter galleries, etc.)
  • Allows the ability to search/exclude by keyword, filter by category or submitter separately or together in any combination
  • Searching and filtering is performed on the current results you are on, e.g. filtering the vegan category gallery
  • Changed the default sort order on your favorites page to “date added”

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Borderless Cards

  • Transitioned to a borderless photo card with a larger 275x275 pixel image
  • Increased the size of the mobile photo card

Miscellaneous

  • Focused on making navigation, dropdown menus and buttons very touch friendly for mobile and tablet devices
  • Reduced page weight for faster page load by decreasing posts per page from 46 to 22

To our fantastic bloggers who submit, the larger, borderless cards requires a minimum image size of 275 x 275 pixels now in order to submit.

We spent a few hundred hours testing the new design on a few dozen devices. We believe we have caught and fixed most of the bugs, but with so many mobile devices in the wild and browsers used, we’re sure there’s an issue or two that we missed. If you see anything strange or broken, please let us know by dropping us a note via the contact form.

We’d like to thank our designer, Maria, and our development firm, Crowd Favorite, for their hard work in making the redesign possible. We hope you enjoy the new features of the site!

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Update - Saturday, June 8th

If you are having issues using the site with older browsers, like Safari 5.x, we have a fix for these browsers that will be released on Monday, June 10th. Let us know if you are having issues on other browsers or devices.

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Update - Monday, June 10th

We released a fix for Safari 5.x browsers this afternoon. If you are using an older versions of Safari (less than 6.0), there is no longer a persistent navigation bar and there is a “load more photos” button after 2 pages. If you want the full benefits of the redesign (infinite scroll, sticky nav bar), we recommend updating your browser to a newer version of Safari, Firefox or Chrome.

Upcoming projects

  • Launch redesign on other sites (craftgawker, stylegawker, dwellinggawker, weddinggawker)
  • Revise and improve the submission form
  • Release the iPad app
  • Update the iPhone app to reflect new design
  • Develop an Android app

Posted by: Chuck Lai

2 notes
  1. gawkerverse posted this