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]
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
25 responses to “Everything You Need To Know About Cult Of Mac’s New Design”
I really like the new design!!
my eyes…
As a designer you have lots of wasted space and the fold could include a ton more content if you tightened up the white space.
I do like the simpleness of it all just the use of CSS and margins needs to be tightened up a tad in my eyes.
With four easy tweaks to margins and paddings I have another advert of yours in the fold.
The new design made me react much like the vampires in a certain twilight-spoof commercial I saw last night, upon the appearance of a gift-bearing friend and his uber-bright headlights. Obscure and overly long simile? Check.
Unfortunately, it sucks on ipad when you are reading more than a couple of lines…there’s no left margin, and that makes it so your reading speed goes down…which makes it so I want to not read a thing here on my ipad..which I use 90% of the time to read this site.
I’d like a blogview the way Gawker sites do.
Looks worse!
the new cultofmac design seems rather cluttered together if you ask me, lots of wasted white space like somebody else pointed out
Well . . . I don’t like it. Though I never understood why the house’s roof on the old home button never came together at the ridge . . . .
I don’t like it at all! It’s messy, cluttered and basically full of adds! I shall be checking cult of Mac via Iphone exclusively from now on!
Sorry guys I love ur website, I know you need the $$$ from advertisement, but this is tooooo much! U can’t advocate clean, simple and efficient products whilst delivering just the opposite yourself!
Check out STEVE JOBS QUOTES AND TRIVIA APP for iPHONE!!!!
Amazing way of learning from our leader!! :-)
Nice, neat, clean, stylish, simple.
Good job!
What is this “DONT MISS” thing that appears on every article? Kind of annoying and it appears the articles just continue below it (Its not even a special segment or anything).
Fix the mobile version, it’s horrible! I hate the ads that follow you and pop up when you scroll.
If you have to explain how to use your new website, your designers failed.
Add a better mobile expierience for Cult Of Mac
I quite like, although I think you made a step back with the new typography. Helvetica Neue is ok but you really need some more margin-top and 24px of line-height (or ems if you’re into relativity that much) for you “.post p” paragraphs. Like this: http://img109.imageshack.us/im…
There are so many Android articles I’m not sure I’m at Cult of Mac.
slow…..slow……slow. 1st item loads, then nothing for about 10+ seconds, yada yada…..
DID I MENTION HOW SLOW IT IS?
i kinda do and dont like it….
Too much white space; it hurts my eyes…
I like the new features, but the old design was better (not that that was great either, but it was ok)
AT&T was like the worst abusive relationship. First she would never let me talk to anybody (no reception), then she was trying to control how much I got out (throttling my data).
AT&T was like the worst abusive relationship. First she would never let me talk to anybody (no reception), then she was trying to control how much I got out (throttling my data). It was the best decision I ever made to leave AT&T… I get great reception now and though I’m on a tiered plan at least it is honest and I know what to expect… Suck it AT&T!
looks like lifehacker and gizmodo with a touch of apple rumors,…. looks horrible! like the old one more…
I like, but I think the sidebar’s still a bit too busy. Probably not gonna stop me from coming here though