Welcome to the new look Pocket-lint More features, new style

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1 October 2008 0:29 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Hello and welcome to a brand new look Pocket-lint. We've added loads of cool new features, completely overhauled the look of the site, but still kept what we do best at the core of everything.

So what's new and how do you use it?

Homepage modules
We write a lot of news and reviews on a daily basis here at Pocket-lint covering lots of subjects. So far this year we've written 5951 news stories and 642 reviews and its only just October. Making sense of that information if you aren't visiting the site on an hourly basis can be confusing so we've introduced modules.

From today you can now create a module of every major channel we list, from over 200 of our tags, and plenty more including latest news and most commented on stories.

Why would you want to do this? Well the result means that you can make your technology news and reviews on Pocket-lint incredibly personalised. Don't want camera news or reviews clogging up the homepage? No problem. Only want Apple news? That's fine too.

You can load new modules via the "Customise homepage" link in the blue bar under the logo at the top of the homepage and you can drag around modules in the first two columns in the order you want giving you the most personalised gadget website around.

Customise homepage
So you load up new modules. You'll also be able to customise the modules themselves giving you even more choice in how you view news on Pocket-lint. Clicking Edit gives you the chance to select just news, just reviews, whether or not to display images, as well as how many stories you want to see in the module.

Quick view
In the past we had a "most read" box that sat on news and review pages on the site. It was helpful in showing you what was hot, but not great if you wanted to see the latest news, most commented or even what our featured articles were. From today you can now load any of the modules on the homepage into the "quick view" slot and then see that information on any page on the site. It's like your own personal window to the news or reviews that interest you the most.

Classic view
We've worked really hard getting the new homepage module to look good and work really well, but hey, we understand you might not like it. So we've created the "classic view". Styled more like the our previous homepage, the "classic view" will let you see stories as they've been published.

New navigation
Left nav, top nav, drop down nav? Deciding which one to go for has been hard, however, we think our final solution is the best one in making navigation around the site really easy.

Scroll over the navigation bar under the logo and a larger grey box will appear giving you secondary categories to choose from, as well as the last five news and reviews we've posted in that channel.

It means you can see all the latest stories on the site within seconds.

ShareThis
We know you love reading Pocket-lint so we've now made it even easier to share stories on all your favourite social networking sites thanks to ShareThis. To share a story all you have to do is click on the green ShareThis logo on a news or reviews page and the software will do the rest.

Simpler design
With so much information to provide making sure we do that simply is always a challenge. We've worked hard with the new design in keeping what we do best at the core, but simply making it easier to read. The whole site has had a new lick of paint to make everything easier on the eye.

Tags
Convergence, such a beautiful word. Trouble is, when it comes to putting gadgets in a box its hard. Should an 8-megapixel camera phone go in Cameras or Phones? At Pocket-lint we decided around 2 years ago to make it both, allowing you to find related content really quickly. The new design still keeps tags however we've moved their location to the top of the story. You'll find the first five tags we've chosen shown, with a drop down menu if there are more so you can find related content quickly without it clogging up the page.

What now?
Go and have a play. If you get over-excited and delete or shift around the homepage modules too much we've created a "reset" button so you can get it back to the default setting. We've tested it to death but with so many browsers now available, and such a big site we might have not found all the bugs and niggles. If you find one please let us know and we can get it fixed.

The future
We've got plenty more ideas to put in place, so stay tuned. In the meantime if you want to tell us what you think, or you've found a bug give us a shout via the comments below or via the feedback form.

Stuart

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Comments

  • Wow - that's so slick Posted by joel, uk
  • loving the new look! Posted by Sophie, UK
  • What an improvement on the old site. Much better to use! Posted by Jon, UK
  • Looks brilliant. I particularly like that you've kept a classic view option - I won't be using it because I'm all for progress, but a lot of people moan about not having that sort of thing. Good stuff. Posted by Matt, UK
  • It's very 'BBC'. Which is no bad thing. I love their re-design. My RSS feed didn't break and apart from some page timeout errors this morning and a few non-existent pages for your schtick at the bottom all has gone rather smoothly from this particular users experience.

    What CMS are you using now? The source doesn't appear to reveal it.     Posted by L.Rawlins, UK
  • Glad everyone is liking the new look site, Matt, I agree, while I love the new modules system, I didn't want people who don't like it to feel we left them behind.

    The great thing is that we've set the cookie so if you do select "classic view" it will remember that fact so you won't have to keep pressing the "classic view" button everytime you visit the site.

    L.Rawlins. glad you like it, yes we did look at the BBC as well as igoogle and lots of other places for good ideas and then hopefully built on the offering.

    As for the CMS, we've built it entirely from scratch from the ground up rather than buying something in. That way we can offer what we want how we want it.     Posted by stuartmiles, United Kingdom
  • Your article 'images' tabs could do with some refinement in my opinion Stuart. This new CMS is re-rendering the whole page everytime I jump between images. Which is subsequently taking my browser view back to the top of the page and not to where the new image is being displayed. This is quite annoying.

    It would be preferable just to load the image change and maintain my view, perhaps with some form of subtle, fading gradient effect if you want to be posh about it. Defaulting to a slideshow format with a pause function couldn't hurt either.

    Criticism yes, but I hope it's deemed constructive.     Posted by L.Rawlins, UK
  • Unfortunately, there's a few page rendering glitches using Firefox 3.0.3 under Win XP SP3.,,,, mainly overlapping text and/or text boxes.

    Otherwise, the "new" site looks great, and is more intuitive to wander around in.... well done guys!     Posted by Geoff, Australia
  • thanks for the comments Geoff, can you let us know the urls you are having trouble with and I will get our programmer to have a look into fixing the problems. Posted by stuartmiles, United Kingdom
  • even an old timer like me can operate it with ease Posted by tony harris, united kingdome

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