Yep, We Redesigned

As many of our readers have noticed (and noted) already, we rolled out a new design for TechCrunch yesterday evening.

We’ve been watching as the initial feedback has rolled in through Twitter and in the comments to our other posts. And while we’re still making lots of small changes, we wanted to take a second to write a proper post explaining our intentions and soliciting your feedback.

Our overarching goal was to clean things up, both on the surface and under the hood. TechCrunch had become bloated in many ways, with the homepage taking way too long to load and the scroll bar going on forever and ever.

So the first step entailed switching over to an “excerpt” format with which readers could get a taste of our posts on the homepage before diving in to read them in full. By cutting down on the amount of content on the homepage, we’ve reduced load times and made it easier to skim our headlines for the news and editorial you care about most.

We’ve also taken a minimalist approach to design that uses lots of whitespace and gives priority to our main content with a wider post width and a larger font size (no more squinting on that high resolution monitor).

As far as particular features go, a new “featured posts” box sits adjacent to the second post on the homepage and in the sidebar of every single post page. It’s intended to highlight some of the content you might otherwise overlook, with a tab for the most recent posts and another for those that garnered the most comments in the past few days. We’ve also started to measure the traffic to our individual posts more closely and will add a tab with the most popular posts as well.

So what’s next? We plan to roll this design – with minor customizations – across most of the other blogs within the TechCrunch Network (CrunchGear, MobileCrunch, TechCrunch UK, etc). We’re also going to launch a new search implementation using Yahoo BOSS Custom that lets you search by keyword across our entire network of blogs, plus CrunchBase.

But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let us know what you think in the comments below.