Nick Denton has finally acknowledged the backlash from Gawker’s controversial site redesign, in a lengthy post that rubbed a few commenters the wrong way and didn’t seem to deliver much word of actual improved functionality.

Denton’s tone suggests perhaps the issues weren’t so much with the site’s frankly awkward design (although there were dozens of “bug fixes,” he admits) but rather that people just aren’t seeing the vision. He begins by explaining that the site’s lack of official word on the backlash was because they were getting a bigger picture of user opinion on the site’s function:

I should first explain the radio silence of the last couple of weeks. We’d wanted to respond to feedback not with promises of future improvements but with actual fixes. So that’s what I’m doing now—but I regret any impression that we weren’t listening.

The post outlines several revisions of the new Gawker, but comments like this from Denton didn’t go over well with remaining readers, many of whom (myself included) use the Canadian Gawker site to bypass the redesign:

News web sites may indeed become more application-like and readers may grow accustomed to swiping instead of scrolling. But they’re not there yet, as the extensive criticism of the sidebar made clear.

Amusingly, the comment thread brought out some of the old-Gawker snark that has been missing in the comments since the new Gawker stumbled into being. One commenter said:

This thread is like finding a surprise packed disco in the bowels of the Marie Celeste.

In an email to staff, Denton described the new layout rollout as “more bruising” to both Gawker media staff and readers than was necessary, and describes the impact on traffic:

Obviously, the reduction in traffic from Google — as from most design changes — has been significant. It doesn’t affect readers of the site — but it does have a disproportionate effect on uniques. Search optimization of the new layout is a top priority.

What I personally find most interesting about all the redesign hand-wringing is the reader response, which seems to be very old-school message board style. The bastard child of the new layout and ensuing outcry is a snark-site called crasstalk.com, and many of the site’s top commenters have apparently fled for good in favor of it, much like what often occurs when a big message board melts down:

I haven’t been back there since about a week after the glitchy new format hit. I – and about 200 of Gawker’s best and most loyal commenters – are now over at www.crasstalk.com , where we get to not only comment but contribute to the site by writing posts on a variety of interesting subjects.

So, who’s right? Are readers just too pedestrian and behind the times to “get” the new Gawker, or was the site a tone-deaf interpretation of what Nick Denton imagines the future of blogs to be? Do you think the readers and commenters that fled are gone forever?

Denton addresses controversial Gawker makeover, details ‘bug fixes’ is a post from: The Inquisitr

I’m a New Yorker, and obviously, a blogger by trade. Gawker is like my New York Times.

I saw a bit of buzzing last week about Gawker and blogs dying or somesuch, but I must have tuned out, because it was a bit of a shock for me to fire up my morning tabs and discover someone had completely revised Gawker and now it is really, really weird. It’s not just Gawker- Jezebel, io9, Deadspin, Kotaku, Jalopnik, Lifehacker and Engadget have all undergone the same re-jigger to display a jarring one story per page.

It’s early to pass judgement on the makeover, as first off, it’s buggy. Kotaku and io9 both failed to load for me, displaying sidelinks, but no main content. Opening different posts in tabs failed for me as well, changing the main tab you’re clicking links off of to the link just clicked- a major pet peeve for people who read sites by opening every relevant link in a tab and then working backwards to the first tab.

At the risk of sounding like the people who get spasticated when Facebook changes their layout at all, I’m not very sure this redesign is going to catch on very well. For one thing, it makes catching up to a large backlog of posts difficult, and pages seem far slower to load. Ads at least seem to take up more space- an understandable change, if that observation is correct, but I found the placement to interrupt my reading of the content. Even now, as I flip back to the Gawker tab I have open, the sidebar still hasn’t loaded and is spinning despite the several minutes the tab has “working.” (See image above.)

Nick Denton seems to disagree with me, saying of the new design:

“It just feels inevitable,” Denton says. “We have a crying need to showcase both exclusives and visual posts. The visual posts are now at least half of our top-performing stories. And audience growth on sites like Deadspin and Gawker has been driven by our most sensational scoops.”

Ex-Gawker editor Gabriel Snyder didn’t concur, however- even willing to wager against Denton that the redesign was ill-conceived:

“I’m on the record that I think the redesigns will fail. And I’m now officially opening the betting pool. I think Denton is going to be forced to pull back on this. If anyone wants to wager that the redesign don’t get yanked back (or greatly modified) by, let’s say, June 1… I’ll take your bet.”

Do you think the redesign will win over Gawker blogs readers? Do blog readers want more of a magazine format? Skimming Gawker, it kind of reminds me of what I ‘don’t’ miss about magazines- difficulty finding and sorting content, having to skim away from large images in which I have no interest (rather than clicking to enlarge interesting pics), and a more time-consuming overall user experience. What are your thoughts?

Are you digging on the Gawker Media extreme makeover? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Peter Rojas and Ryan Block, the guys behind AOL blog Engadget (Rojas also founded Gizmodo) have launched Gdgt…which is not surprisingly pronounced Gadget.

Gdgt isn’t what you’d expect from the talented pair though, because it’s not a blog. Indeed, the reason I’m writing this post now and not 6 hours ago is because I’m not sure either. Block and Rojas are pitching it as a social network for people who like gadgets, but it’s not at all like Facebook or similar sites. The closest description I can find is forum with some social elements.

The launch of the site has gained a huge amount of attention online, even taking Gdgt down at one stage, so it should start with strong prospects. However its success will come mostly off the back of Rojas and Block’s rightly deserved reputations and not anything the site offers. The problem with Gdgt is that in trying to be different, the site is really very similar to existing sites through its borrowed elements. The question then becomes one of social appeal: can the community be the selling point given you get the same doses of gadget loving elsewhere? If I was betting I’d say yes, but only because Peter Rojas and Ryan Block are running the show. Anyone else and I’d say this was not going to end well.

The explanation video (they needed one to explain the site) as follows:

Go Go Gdgt….Forum? is a post from: The Inquisitr