Welcome to Ars Technica v5.5!
Welcome to the new and improved Ars Technica! We’ve taken much of the feedback received since our January launch of v5.0, and we’ve talked to subscribers in the Editorial Roundtable, to create what we believe is the best reading experience for you. Most of the changes are fairly obvious, but I want to walk through them with you and explain how they work and why we’ve made them.
The first change that meets the eye is the removal of the three large promotional boxes at the top of the page. Testing and feedback routinely told us two things: many people did not understand what was up there and why, and others felt like the size of it just led to a kind of banner blindness. We have made two adjustments to how we promote stories. From now on, only feature articles (typically multipage articles) will receive special promotion, and that promotion will happen at the top right of the front page in the new features box. It will hold the last 10 features that you can scroll back through in chronological order. By default it will scroll automatically, but that can be paused, and it will remember your preference. Of course, you will be able to easily spot features in the listing of content on the front page as well. Features will now have a slightly larger image and a feature badge, which helps them to stand out. We received a lot of complaints that it was easy to miss our features. Now with the scrolling feature box and with these new listings, we believe it will be much better.
