Editor’s note: Welcome to the new Cult of Mac

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Welcome to the new look. Cult of Mac has been redesigned -- now with infinite scroll!
Welcome to the new look. Cult of Mac has been redesigned -- now with infinite scroll!
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

Welcome to the new Cult of Mac! You probably noticed that we’ve freshened the place up a bit.

We have a new, minimalist design that we trust is easy to read and a pleasure to visit. We have new fonts, cleaner navigation, improved photo treatments and stories that are color-coded by category (news, reviews, how-tos and so on).

We also have a new, modern code base, which we hope will be a solid platform for lots more exciting things to come.

Cult_of_Mac_responsive_redesign

The main story section is now a continuous scroll, which should make it easier for you to find stuff to read. If you’re a regular visitor and come to the site’s front page every day, you can simply scroll down the story list as normal. But instead of hitting a “Page 2” button at the bottom, just keep scrolling — older posts will load automatically.

Same goes if you visit from a link and land on an individual story page. Once you get to the end of the comments, you’ll see a scroll of all the latest posts.

We like it a lot. We were influenced by sites like The Next Web and Time and Quartz, which have been using this type of design for a while. It’s a modern navigation scheme that’s well-suited to tablets. It’s great for blogs, making it really easy to peruse quite a lot of content, encouraging you guys to read more of our posts (we hope!).

Behind the scenes, the biggest change is that the site is fully responsive: It automatically resizes itself to whatever device you are viewing it on. The old site relied on a WordPress plugin to serve up a different version of the site for smartphones. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but it meant we essentially had two separate sites. If we made changes on one, we had to make changes on the other. A responsive site means we can do things just once.

One site to rule them all!

That’s the point: The redesigned site is a great platform for future updates. We will be rolling out all kinds of improvements going forward, from eye-popping multimedia galleries to an awesome new review template.

We’ve been working on this redesign for a looooooong time. It was a major undertaking. We owe a huge debt to our designer, KC Bradshaw of San Francisco design firm Exkclamation, who has done a phenomenal job, and to Pedro Dobrescu, Mihai Grescenko and the rest of the technical team at Presslabs (the best WordPress hosts in the world).

Fingers crossed that you are reading this OK and the site looks stellar, but you’ll probably see a few glitches here and there while we make the changeover. So please be kind, and leave your feedback in the comments. Even the harsh stuff helps — it tells us what to fix.

Hope you like it!

Leander Kahney
Editor and publisher

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