MDN About to Get a Facelift

MDN is about to get a face lift–long overdue and badly needed. When you click on a headline in the daily email to visit the site to read full stories today, you will notice the font styles have changed. That’s a temporary change. Fonts, colors and more will be changed starting next week. We have selected a new, cleaner (more modern) “theme” for the site, that will launch sometime next week.

Why the change? A variety of reasons–the biggest being that we haven’t changed the look and feel of the website since it began in 2009. MDN looks like an eight-year-old website! A lot has changed since then, most noticeably, half or more of our readers now read MDN on a smart phone (or tablet, or other non-computer device). The site needs to automatically change and respond to whatever device is being used to read it–something called “responsive design” in the business.

What will change? The overall structure will, for now, not change. We hate it when we arrive at a favorite/familiar website to see everything is rearranged, with no prior warning. That won’t happen with MDN. The same overall architecture remains, with stories on the left of the page, links to various things on the right. Same drop-down menus along the top. Basically what we are doing is giving the site a new coat of paint. The fonts will change, and the font colors will change (a darker font, to make it easier to read). Better use of white space. The date of a post, which has always been part of the post (but hard to find at the bottom) will be moved to the top, much easier to spot. Little things, basically, will be tweaked and changed to make reading full articles a more pleasant experience. At least, that’s what we hope!

We will alert you when the changes roll out. As always, we appreciate your feedback and ideas on how to make it a better site. Stay tuned for what’s coming next week!

2 Comments

  1. Thanks for all your efforts over the years, Mr. Willis.
    Your site is definitely THE pre-eminent go to site for Appalachian Basin developments.
    The site change is great and most welcome as we are all continuing to shift to tablet/smart phone useage.

    One tiny request … can you encourage the Energy in Depth folks to also update their site?
    The grey upon grey letters/background on their homepage can be unreadable in bright surroundings.
    Once again, much appreciation for your work!
    Appalachia Rising!