redesign

The Ars redesign is out. Experience its ad-free glory for just $25/year.

ars technica, redesign, Staff, subscriptions / Tim Belzer / November 6, 2024

Whew—the big event is finally behind us. I’m talking, of course, about the Ars Technica version 9 redesign, which we rolled out last month in response to your survey feedback and which we have iterated on extensively in the weeks since. The site is now fully responsive and optimized for mobile browsing, with a sleek new look and great user options.

In response to your comments, our tireless tech and design team of Jason and Aurich have spent the last few weeks adding a font size selector, tweaking the default font and headline layout, and adding the option for orange hyperlinks. Plus, they rolled out an all-new, subscriber-only “wide mode” for Ars superfans who need 100+ character line lengths in their lives. Not enough? Jason and Aurich also tweaked the overall information density (especially on mobile), added next/previous story buttons to articles, and made the nav bar “sticky” on mobile, all in response to your feedback. (Read more about our two post-launch rounds of updates here and here.)

If that’s still not enough site goodness, Jason and Aurich are currently locked in their laboratory, cooking up a brand-new “true light” theme and big improvements to commenting and comment voting.

So while they’re brewing up those potions, I wanted to take a moment to highlight our subscription offering. At just $25 a year, this is a great deal that does more than just support our fully unionized staff; it also offers real quality-of-life benefits to readers. Subs don’t see any ads, nor are they served any trackers. They get access to the ultra-dense “Neutron Star” layout and the bloggy “Ars Classic” view, along with the optional wide-text mode and the ability to filter topics. (Plus full-text RSS feeds, PDF downloads, and some other little goodies.)

The Ars redesign is out. Experience its ad-free glory for just $25/year. Read More »

Based on your feedback, the Ars 9.0.1 redesign is live

We love all the feedback that Ars readers have submitted since we rolled out the Ars Technica 9.0 design last week—even the, err, deeply passionate remarks. It’s humbling that, after 26 years, so many people still care so much about making Ars into the best possible version of itself.

Based on your feedback, we’ve just pushed a new update to the site that we hope fixes many readers’ top concerns. (You might need to hard-refresh to see it.)

Much of the feedback (forum posts, email, DMs, the Ars comment form) has told us that the chief goals of the redesign—more layout options, larger text, better readability—were successful. But readers have also offered up interesting edge cases and different use patterns for which design changes would be useful. Though we can’t please everyone, we will continue to make iterative design tweaks so that the site can work well for as many people as possible.

So here’s a quick post about what we’ve done so far and what we’re going to be working on over the next few weeks. As usual, continued feedback is welcome and appreciated!

Changes made and changes planned

The 9.0 design was based on reader feedback; an astonishing 20,000 people took our most recent reader survey, and most of these readers don’t post in the comments or the Ars forums. The consensus was that readability and customization were the most significant site design issues. We’ve addressed those through (among other things) a responsive design that unifies desktop and mobile codebases, increased text size to meet modern standards, and four site layout options (Classic, Grid, List, and the super-dense Neutron Star view).