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March 1, 2006

Memeorandum (finally) gets a new look

Michael Arrington

16 comments »

Gabe Rivera, the founder of Memeorandum, announces a slightly new look for his cult favorite site.

Since the September launches, I’ve heard a lot of reactions to the user interface, and the results have been mixed. The usability and functionality are generally appreciated, but the aesthetics are, just a bit too often, reviled.

“It’s hurting my eyes” goes the woeful refrain.

While I’m all about having the impact of memeorandum felt, I don’t really want to hurt your eyes.

So the redesign you see is aimed at just that. No major functional changes, just a general reduction in rate of eye injury.

I’m happy to see this update to the look and feel of the site. I’ve given Gabe my honest opinion many times that the previous design was hurting traffic - the first impression of many visitors was negative and they often fled the site before realizing how important Memeorandum is to the blogosphere.

I would personally have gone much further in the redesign, but its a good start and its certainly a cleaner layout.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. web.develop blog

    March 3rd, 2006 at 7:20 am

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  1. Axel Wolf

    March 1st, 2006 at 3:04 am

    Colors are always hit or miss; but if you have a large screen the layout is worse than before, much more scrolling required.

  2. PeteCashmore

    March 1st, 2006 at 3:32 am

    I really, really like the redesign, although I agree with Axel - the left-hand column seems to be smaller now, which means more scrolling.

  3. Mario

    March 1st, 2006 at 6:11 am

    Nice and cleaner. Maybe the site deserves a better logo too.

  4. Kenny

    March 1st, 2006 at 7:06 am

    Subtle changes do wonders

  5. Tim Malbon

    March 1st, 2006 at 9:57 am

    I agree that this has not gone far enough - by miles. For me, the redesign has tidied things up, but the design is still pretty arbitrary. The colurs are dirty, the text is all over the place, there is no sense of rhythm or design unity.

    Why oh why don’t Memeorandum throw the gauntlet down and hold a design competition. I for one would definitely enter.

    As with many of the sites you cover (although not all of them - I have to say that I am very impressed with Newsvine) we reckon there are a number of usability issues as well. We’ll be user testing a number of sites - including the big boys like Flickr - over the next few weeks and I’d liketo find somewhere to post the results…

  6. Michael Arrington

    March 1st, 2006 at 10:05 am

    Oh, great idea Tim! Gabe, do it, do it, do it!

  7. iTodd

    March 1st, 2006 at 11:23 am

    I didn’t spend much time on the old site, but I wouldn’t be touting that as a re-design or claiming it doesn’t hurt your eyes. Yuck. Whats with the non anti-aliased uppercase italics in the headers? Looks like 1997 geocities sites all over again. Not 1996 geocities cause it *does* have rounded corners.

  8. feedscott

    March 1st, 2006 at 11:49 am

    Must be a slow day in W2 land if Mike can write up a minimal cosmetic change on tech meme and Pete Cashmore has time can comment on it :)

  9. Haarball

    March 1st, 2006 at 2:59 pm

    Flattening the logo and changing the colour scheme would do wonders. It’s better, but it’s still fairly horrible.

    Also, the right column needs to fixed. It should to be (re)organized and have neat features added to it.

    A design compo - now there’s an idea.

  10. mcubed

    March 1st, 2006 at 3:44 pm

    Memeorandum was redesigned?

    */me wonders if my computer has entered alternate universe/

    Wow, I guess my powers of observation are really waning as I age!

  11. kosmar

    March 1st, 2006 at 4:27 pm

    its still that ugly, that i would never use it just for that reason. competition? count me in.

  12. CHEESETOE

    March 1st, 2006 at 11:21 pm

    You know it’s funny, I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what Memorandum looked like before the change. RSS has totally changed the way I surf. If I see a post on Memorandum (or TechCrunch) I like in the RSS feed, I click it and without even looking, click the corresponding link to the site with the article. Sorry to all the web designers out there but, on my end, RSS is making web aesthetics obsolete.

  13. kosmar

    March 1st, 2006 at 11:44 pm

    well, we will just design custom css for feedreader users then …
    looks like there are more readers than relevant site, so thats probably the long tail of webdesign then …

  14. PeteCashmore

    March 2nd, 2006 at 11:41 am

    Scott,

    Yeah, and it’s a really, really slow day when Pete comes back again to respond to your comment. :)

  15. fatality9mnn

    July 20th, 2006 at 6:29 am

    Eddie800 pokermnn

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