Apparently, about a month ago (not sure of the exact date), About.com did a major redesign, and sadly, it went largely unnoticed. I could find a few mentions of it in a handful of blogs and a forum I visit, but it didn't cause the kind of stir that a major redesign of a major site would normally cause. In a way, I'm not surprised, because About.com has always been the kind of site that many people hate, and yet, it's still a huge presence on the Internet. How sad is it to own one of the largest sites, do a MAJOR design overhaul, and have it go almost unnoticed? Ah well, here's a little mention from me, at least a month later. I have to admit, the redesign is marvelous. I don't know if it's enough to make me stop hating when I accidentally arrive there from clicking on a search results page (without noticing what URL is associated with the result), but maybe it is. We'll see. In any case, here's the new look along with the old. (Note that the home page from archive.org refused to show some images, not sure why, but you can still see the vast difference).
It used to be so bad I would stopped using it years ago. BAsed on your posts I took another look at it and it does seem like they have made it much better. Still they don’t follow simple web conventions on things like RSS. Look at a blog and then click on RSS – do you get the RSS feed for that blog like anywhere sensible online? Nope, you get some crazy options to chose from a bunch of feeds on the topic – none of which is the blog you were on when you presses the RSS button. They did improve from very lame to maybe an ok design. I might actually use it again because they do have decent content if you can actually get to it in the small windows they give for real content versus tons of ads. You can just use the blog home page to add the blog to your RSS reader.
Great catch, Donna. My reason for not spending more time there with old design was that their ads were too numerous and clunky, frequent pop-ups and just slow. The new design seems a lot cleaner and faster.
I plan to use it a little just as a test, but I’m not convinced they’ll overcome my strong dislike for it. But they deserve a shot at convincing me, I think.
I hadn’t noticed because I am always on the inner pages, not the home, but I am glad they have redesigned it – it looked horrible now that I see screenshots.