As you may have noticed, Cult of Mac brought in a new week with a brand spanking new redesign. Besides updating our old color scheme to be more subtly evocative of OS X Lion’s design instead of Snow Leopard’s, the guiding principle behind the new Cult of Mac design is to make it easier for our readers to know what’s new, what’s hot, what’s being talked about and what’s going on. Here’s everything you need to know about what’s new.
New Header
Aside from shifting our logo and color scheme to blue, the new header allows you to more easily search our archives, navigate to our various subsites, or send us a tip. It also contains helpful links at the top-right corner of all of our various social media presences, so if you want to know where to find us on Facebook, Twitter or Google+, you can do so from any page.
New Top Stories Bar
We’ve replaced our old Top Stories bar with a new rotating banner that keeps front page users connected at a glance with the day’s most important stories. It’s more visually engaging than the old Top Stories bar, while also allowing us to provide more information about a story than just the headline. You can switch between stories by just hovering over the numbers at the bottom left. Another plus about our new Top Stories bar is it only shows up on our homepage, meaning that if you’re coming directly to a post from an outside link, you won’t have to scroll past the top stories bar every time.
This Week’s Most… Sidebar
One of the problems with the old design was that it was impossible for you to navigate quickly to only our most popular content. We’ve fixed that with our new “This Week’s Most…” sidebar, which allows readers to quickly read the week’s most popular stories or join the week’s best Cult of Mac comment threads.
Latest News, Reviews & How-Tos Sidebar
Does what it says on the tin!
Featured Stories Sidebar
In the new Cult of Mac design, the sidebar also allows us to promote our best stories and original feature content on every page in a non-intrusive but still visually engaging way.
Hide Android Stories!
Do you foam at the mouth at having to read about Android on the Cult of Mac? Well, we think it’s important to know what the “enemy” is doing if Apple’s going to beat Google in the mobile space, but if just the mention of Android makes you see red, just click the “Hide Android Posts With Cookie (Beta)” link at the bottom of the page and you should never see Android stories on CoM again. You’re welcome!
So what do you think? What do you like about the new design and what do you think could be better? Let us know in the comments: we can’t wait to hear your thoughts.
[teaser-top](Including how to hide those obnoxious Android posts…)[/teaser-top]
[teaser-featured](Including how to hide those obnoxious Android posts…)[/teaser-featured]
