apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I think it looks great. I also know that change is hard for a lot of people (me, I love change...especially dimes). Keep growing your brand and your brand names. There's a reason the CEO of a decor/entertainment empire fears you, you're good at what you do and nimble.

Cheers!

The new design is great. Congratulations! I work with graphic designers, who by nature are also interested in product design and space design. When I shared your site with them, some couldn’t get past the clunky (their word) old design of the site. I’ll have to send them the link again so AT gets a second chance.

The reason I love your site is it gives me what the shelter magazines (and their sites) typically don’t : a spirit of inclusion, a nice mix of high design inspiration and “real” design for real people, plenty of DIY ideas for those of us who can’t hire it out, and the voices of many. As long as that stays, I’ll keep coming back.

What about the order of the posts (i.e. new posts not always appearing on top). That's my pet peeve and many agreed with me. If you don't change that visiting this site will be very discouraging for me (never feeling sure I haven't missed just what I needed) and I'll probably visit less. Since visitation=profit, I hope you'll change that particular "feature."

I absolutely love the new design. It was great to open the page, and see something fresh and different. I feel it's even better to navigate, and the sister sites look fantastic! Wonderful job. And of course, I am so happy to see my blog link on the SF page. Yeah!!!

Matilda - the timing issue is being worked on. It complicates matters that different sites are in different time zones. Please be patient while we work through this!

Why do the links and friends only show along the left when you click through to full posts?

I love using AT as a gateway and figure that it'd be helpful for continued traffic if it functions that way for other people as well.

I love it!!! keep up the good work Maxwell :-)

RE: Sequence and timing of posts. I, for one, wouldn't mind (and would almost expect) that SF and LA would have a bunch of posts in a row in our overnight hours. So what -- that was some of the fun for me in logging on in the morning - I would see the first couple of NY posts and then click over to SF & LA and have a bunch of new posts from their afternoon. I don't think the time zone thing is a factor -- just post them in the actual sequence regardless of time zone.

I like the new names. Thanks for the explanation. It's fun to hear the thought process. I especially like the fonts associated with each new name.

Excellent Job. It works in firefox. You previous design constantly gave me a 500 error when posting a comment. Now no problem in firefox.

...follow the white rabbit...

I need to get into Products, Services & Stores. Where are they?

On a lot of the posts it read Comments 0 when in fact there are a lot of comments.

when I click the "read more" on the guest room entry, it says "404 not found"...

What's with the abbreviated posts in the feeds? I do not like it, Sam-I-am. I know you want people to click through so you get the ad revenue, but that's what the comment section is for.

Bring back full-content feeds!

Dancing, we're looking into feeds and will keep you posted.

Although it will take some getting used to I like the redesign and it does make sense. Like the links to the other sites at the bottom of the page. Also noticed that some threads list 0 comments when there are actually several when thread is opened.

A little confusing and it's unclear to me whether when comments are made on a thread that appears on the Main AT page if your comments also show up on the same posting on the regional site and visa versa?

Love the change. It looks more professional, clean and white-ier. I can see the advantage. The ads don't bother me and the left hand panel of links of interest and "what's happening" is a great idea.
Great work.. I know that it must've been taken a while to get all the bugs ironed out.

Thanks!

joel pirela
www.blueantstudio.com

I've read some of yesterday's comments, but refrained from making one myself. Change is hard for most people. It's natural to feel more comfortable with what one knows. I want to use the new design for a while, before making any judgments. But I do feel confident that, given your design talent (and your team's), we will end up with an improved AP.

I can hardly wait until the search function is ready, I need to use it!

I read the site through RSS - is anyone else having problems? I can't link through to the posts properly.

Ok, but what happened to services?

Whhoooooaaaaahhh CHANGE!
Ok, Ok, Give me a few days, I'm slowly getting used to it!

Its nice to hear the origin of the names, it wasnt immediately apparant what they all meant.....

Congratulations, this looks like a lot of hard work!

Kudos on the new design :)

The one comment I do have is regarding the small grey font used on the left hand column (specifically, the fonts used under Top House Tours, Top Posts, Links, etc. - i.e. "Jennifer Bartlett's 134 Charles Street") look very "scrunched up" and skewed in my newest versions of IE and Firefox. They are readable but only with a bit of concentration.

I just clicked over to ohdeedoh, and attempted to answer a survey when I realized that I wasn't logged in. Is it possible to keep me logged in when I'm in your family of sites? Pretty please? I realize that would require some serious work on your part...

I DO like the overall layout & usability of the new design. Great job - thank you!!! It used to be click-heavy and cumbersom to first go through the NY pages, then the SF pages, and then other area pages (LA, Chicago, Tech, Kitchen), and half of the time the posts would be re-posts from the other pages.

================================

/start crazy-brain mode
The disease which is my nit-picky brain:

From my amateur design/branding perspective - I don't like the font mix. I very much like the Helvetica body text, and wish it were also the font of the submit & preview comment buttons, which are currently in Arial. What bugs me is the serif font for the post titles when viewing the main pages. The larger font & gray is enough to make the text stand out as "title" text - it doesn't need serifs too. The serif font also, to me, screams "Retro!!!", when most of the content is modern design. Eventually, can we get a title font in the same font family (sans serif) as the rest of the text? :)

And if any more professional design/branding folks would like to disagree with me, please do! As an amateur font/design geek, I love enlightenment.

Oh, and don't get me started on the current "Do It Now!" banner in the upper left. It's in color font, when no other text is in color in that column. The title is in title case, and the "January Jumpstart" is in small caps. Wha??? And then the colors are the same as the 2 largest cities represented - my brain is saying, "Is 'Do It Now' for the LA folks, and 'January Jumpstart' for the NY people?"

/end crazy brain mode
:)

I like the new layout even better than the old. I'm glad that all of the cities are on one page now so everyone can get equal attention.

I always wondered why more us of east-coasters did not frequent or comment on the other cities' sites (I do all the time). Now it's just more simplified.

Thank you.

Will you be activating an RSS feed? I'm having the same problem that jenc has...what's up with that?

Thanks! Otherwise, really like what I see. It's a heck of alot of work to do - and I think overall you did a great job.

Second day.
Still hate it.
hate hate hate it!
So confusing. So Cluttered. So disappointing. I've just spent 45 minutes trying to simply navigate the re-design posts. I usually spend 30 minutes at lunch navigating ALL the at sites, reading and commenting on posts i'm interested in.
I realized you may have decreased the number of ads (which NEVER bugged me before, and that I often jumped over to), but I can't tell what's what. What's a post? What's an ad? What's a new feature? What's a deeper part of the blog, like store, community,house tours, or products & services.
Damn.
This was one of my home pages.
Now i'm immensely frustrated and CANNOT send friends here to explain my ongoing home "work" because I think it will just confuse them.
What the Hell?!!?!

btw,
Here's what I posted over at The Kitchn site:
Left my very disappointed comments over at the very confusing main AT site (or was it new york?, and was it a completely different site?, and WHY?).
HATE THIS!
I am profoundly bummed.
And I find the separation the Kitchen section dumb and ironic. A main component of the Cure and AT's philosophy is to cook at home, to bring warmth and life to your apt by using your kitchen. (Which is why I'm assuming there was a Kitchen section on a 'design' site - am I wrong?)
As I've been doing the cure for the last year (deep treatment girl here) I've been looking forward to the day when I would switch my home page from ATNY to ATKitchen.
Whatever.
I promised I would keep coming back through the holiday's to give it a fair shot and so I will. But this just sucks. I really feel like I've lost something.
I'm sure readership will remain high, but I can't help feeling there will be a large turnover in who is here from long time AT participant's to new AT SHOPPERS.

i'm so glad i can now page back to the posts i missed in the last day or two!

this new design is also very successful in getting me to check out the sister blogs (that i've always known they were there, but never bothered to visit)

but in the end, i still don't like the new redesign -- it feels cold and as if the close-knit community has been burst open to the whole country. as lovely and as crowded as Target on a Saturday afternoon.

hahaha, sorry, the plggd comment really cracks me up. i'm still getting used to the design and finding bugs. i'll come back when i'm more with it.

it is taking some time to adjust to the new site, there are just too many ads and it makes a.t. seem more like a machine than grassroots.
but maybe that's what you want.

Yesterday I left a post complaining about a couple of things, including the absence of the "Products" lists. If it's okay, I would like to expand on that one.

I discovered AT during a year-long redecoration project in which I replaced virtually every piece of furniture I owned. I purchased all but a couple of pieces over the Internet. AT's Products list was invaluable and, in the course of the project, I became a daily AT visitor.

Now I am accessorizing (dinnerware, etc.), and I've continued to visit the Products list for information and inspiration--until it disappeared in the roll out of the new "improved" site. Before then, the Products list had become my first stop when contemplating a purchase.

Your Shopping Guide is helpful, of course, but except for the shops with web sites, the listings are of limited use to people who don't live in an AT city (people like me, as my screen name suggests). Indexing the shops by product type is helpful, but only marginally. I want to know about products first, sources second. Your Shopping Guide is the other way around and for that reason is far less useful. Please bring back the Products list.

the new layout is very distracting, especially with all the new ads. it's overwhelming ...

Can you guys look into the RSS thing I sad yesterday? I almost always read through my RSS then click through to look at full posts and pics I want, but How do I know you're talking about SF vs Chicago? Are there plans for that?

Just wanted to second the full content RSS feed. I'm not going to click on every single post and then expand the post and then go back to read the next post. I read a lot of blogs and just want to chug through them. If the post is interesting I'll click over to leave a comment. I'm really bummed about this, I'm afraid I'll miss something below the cut but I just don't have the time to keep clicking over, it takes too long. Half the time there's like a sentence below the cut and so much time is wasted, it's very frustrating. I miss the way it was, it was so perfect, and the posts were really great.

One suggestion I haven't seen mentioned is that the size of the TITLES of the posts should be made bigger and bolder. (Or maybe the font size on my monitor is set too large? Either way, this site looks weird on my monitor, where it didn't before.) Changing that might help with the commenters who found that 'their eye didn't have a place to rest upon as a focus'. It would help clarify the separateness of each post, and maybe just a small change like that would help with what people are calling 'a busy look'.

And what cara says above regarding the mix of fonts and colors seems exactly right to me. As she suggests, "Eventually, can we get a title font in the same font family (sans serif) as the rest of the text?"

To be frank, I find the new design to be kind of boring and middle of the road-- more like HGTV than Design Sponge. But I guess that's OK as long as the info is still there. Unfortunately, at the moment, Search doesn't work and neither does the shopping guide-- I suppose that will be fixed. Most people seem to like it though, so I'm obviously in a tiny minority. Personally, I used to read the blog every day, but my level of interest just took a nosedive. I prefer the older, "unprofessional" design-- sorry!

I don't mind the ads; it costs money to keep something like this going. But I wish it was a little more groovalicious.

Anyhow, best of luck!

Actually, I just looked at Design Sponge and I think it looks terrible too... maybe I'm just out of style myself. ;-)

I have a panicky/anxious feeling because I feel like new posts keep popping up after older posts. Am I crazy? Is this really happening? I'm most familiar with the NY site, so that's mainly what I'm referring to. That's my biggest beef.

Stuff like the name changes I can deal with, but missing posts is making me lose my mind! The font issue Cara brought up is also bugging me, although not as much as the possibility of missing posts. I like to be thorough.

At home on my Mac, I still cannot post in Firefox. I'm using Safari right now, but I'd rather not have to switch browsers for just one site.

The Firefox problem has cut back my posting a lot. I still do it from work a bit, but only for short posts.

When I open the site in Firefox, the ads start frenetically flashing and jumping to different parts of the page. Only after a few seconds do they move to where they're supposed to be. Anyone else having this issue?

I also logged on today to give the new design a 2nd chance, but it's waaaaaay to cluttered for an easy read (I miss the old nice looking easy-on-the-eyes layout).

Hard to tell between ads and editorial....

And still having a heck of a time on my laptop seeing everything properly....not all of us have big nice screens!

At the moment, it's impossible to access the older House Tours like mine. When you go to the bottom of the thing of the recent ones, and then it says something like "Older House Tours" it doesn't click through to it.

But if I find an old "link" to mine that I click through from an old e-mail I find in my "sent" folder, that I had sent a friend, I get there just fine.

While i'm all about change and growth...one of the things i liked about aptherapy was that it had a diy/indie feel to it...the new interface seems boring and overly typical. The jumping ads are obnoxious. Its nearly impossible to find previous posts "questions", "features", "tours", etc....arrrgh! too much too fast?

I'm sorry, but I really don't like the new design at all. I'm baffled by all the raves. I've given it awhile now and I just find that I don't want to visit the site at all anymore. When I'm on it I get visually overwhelmed by all the small text on the left and the ads on the right. It looks so much more generic and commercial that I'm really surprised. I think it's the top of the home page that's the worst. It's less jarring as you scroll down. There are WAY too many colors, moving images, all of that small font squashed on the left...between the orange, fuschia, peach, and turquoise...hell you might as well have pop-ups given how un-visually calming it is. It might as well be the website for Bed, Bath, and Beyond. I can't focus on anything and won't even attempt to find something specific on the site. I'm saying this because I love what you guys do. Really, if this website were a living room, could you honestly say it was successful and welcoming? I say it's time to purge and pick a couple of strong colors. Some strong image or block of color to ground the eye? I rarely comment, but I thought it was worth the effort this time. I'll be sorry to be weaned of my AT addiction...