Today marks a week since the new RMNB website went live. Almost all of the feedback I’ve seen and received privately has been positive. And even the criticism has been mostly productive. So I wanted to thank you all for that. Y’all are the best.
Big change can sometimes be unnerving and frustrating, especially in a place where you hang out and read every day. Those feelings are real and I have time for anyone who has needed or still needs time to adjust. Which is why I’m writing today. As we move forward on the new website, I think it’s best to just talk things out when necessary. My thought process is this: If you understand our challenges before, you might understand and better appreciate our solutions now. And during that process, you might learn how to use the website better and better understand what to expect in the future.
So here are some observations we’ve seen and an explanation from my end.
Dude, RMNB, what’s the deal with the homepage and featured callouts?
This is the big one I’ve seen a few places, including our Discord (which you can join through Patreon). And I’ll give the floor to longtime reader and commenter Dan, who wrote this in the comment section of one our stories on Tuesday and received 35 likes. My attention: grabbed!
Dan writes:
Visually I love the new RMNB refresh but I feel compelled to say that navigating it is atrocious. Two things stand out:
1. The topmost article isn’t always the most recently posted.
2. The comments for the article I’m currently reading are separated by a long list of other recommended articles.
I can’t be alone in my opinion that neither of these organizational decisions make any sense at all.
First off, I think navigating the site is new and thus a little unfamiliar because of that. But I think it’s way improved from before. What I do want to speak to about is the layout of the homepage. First on desktop. For the longest time, RMNB was like a classic blog: the latest post is at the top and then the next article follows after that. It was the standard that many sports and news websites abandoned a loooooong time ago.
There’s a reason why. Most people who land on a homepage do not scroll. You only have a few seconds to capture their attention. With our old layout, they would see the first story above the fold and if they don’t find it interesting, they’d peace out and bounce.
For a small website like us, that’s a missed opportunity. We want to give someone something interesting to click on. We want them to read our content (we know it’s good!) and, sorry to say, be exposed to ads so that we can pay our writers and continue to do this for you. We want to get new people engaged so they can turn into long-term readers, which begins a snowball effect that helps us grow over time.
So to fix the problem, on desktop we now have four articles that are shown above the fold.
On mobile, the layout remains one by one, but what you see at the top may not be our most recent written story.
Our site structure is now this:
- a top article, which shows first and is what we think is the most important thing we think you need to know at the moment
- three featured stories that are in order of when they were posted
- And then a listing of news articles in order of when they were published
So the difference now is: our top four articles are dependent on how big those stories are. If there’s important breaking news like Aliaksei Protas signing a five-year extension or Nicklas Backstrom joining the team on its latest road trip, it will live on the top for a while because it’s something everyone should know. And then other important stories that are timely will follow before getting to the rest of the listings and stories you might have missed.
The people this change has affected the most is our most precious readers: the peeps that hang out and interact everyday. The people who just type in our homepage url in their browser or search RMNB through Google. We appreciate you and please forgive us for the small annoyance.
I want to comment, RMNB, but now I’ve got to scroll a little extra to get there. Ughhhhh.
Welcome to criticism number two, which makes me happy because in the grand scheme of things, it’s minor. Tell me I’m wrong.
At the bottom of every article, we added two widgets:
- Latest RMNB News
- Related Articles
Here’s how it looks on desktop.
The problem we were trying to solve was this: most people get to our site by landing on an article through RMNB social media promotion (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) or Google News. Then they peace out.
This, friends, is again another missed opportunity for us. We want this person to click on more stories and read more. We get more ad money, and we also have a better chance again of turning someone into a hardcore reader, who might join our Patreon, buy merch, or tell someone they know to read us, too.
These links are there to try and improve our bounce rate. And a week in, that number has already improved.
RMNB, why did you change the logo?
We did not change the logo. The only thing that’s different is that now its more crisp and high res.
Why don’t you have an app?
There’s no reason at this point why we’d need an app. But if you want easy access to us, you can add RMNB to your home screen on your phones. This is something I do and I LOVE IT.
I hope this helped! And if you have any more questions, you can ask in the comments.
On my end as a user, from what I’ve observed on RMNB, the new site loads quicker, our articles and the content within are presented much cleaner and better, and the mobile experience has been completely transformed in a positive way. Our workflow behind the scenes has improved and we’re writing even more thorough articles too, which I wasn’t necessarily expecting.
This first week has me optimistic about our future. I know change is hard, but please bear with us and yourself as you get more familiar with the changes. We are already seeing positive trends behinds the scenes and just know, we made these hard decisions for the long-term health of the site.
We want to stay independent and we want to do this – literally this – for a long time. We want you to remain on this journey with us for the long haul, too. So I hope this peek under the hood helped.
