Hey everyone,
It hasn’t been a long while since we revamped our website. Today, we’re rolling out a new update for our website, and it packs a lot of new features.
A faster, and simpler site
The new update for our website doesn’t really focus on a lot of design changes. The layout is mostly the same, and the typography is also pretty same. With the latest update – which was codenamed Shunno (that’s Zero), our main focus was to make the design cleaner and improve it based on our readers’ feedback.
We’ve changed the color scheme of the whole site, and we’ve also added an improved footer. Alongside the improved footer, we’ve also added a new hamburger menu – if you’re on a computer, just resize the browser and you’ll be able to see it in action, but if you’re using a smartphone, you should already be able to open it from the navigation bar. Everything from reviews to the sharing buttons has a new or improved look.
We’ve also added some new layouts for Editorials, Features as well as Reviews, which will focus primarily on the content – just like this article.
[shunno-quote align=”left”]Everything from reviews, to the sharing buttons has an improved look[/shunno-quote]
It’s also worth noting that we’ve fully redesigned the dark theme for the site. It’s sexier than ever before – especially on Microsoft Edge. The new design of our site is undoubtedly the cleanest so far. We’ve removed things that our readers didn’t like and improved the overall experience. As I said earlier, there isn’t much change on the website design – but we did, indeed, bring some key changes to the design to make the user experience a lot better.
As the design is pretty same to our old one, we expect that our readers would like it just as much or even more than the old one. Just like Windows Phone and our new logo, we’ve focused on simplicity for the new design. Obviously, there are a lot of things that can look better – and if you’ve any design suggestions, let us know.
Voting for articles
One of the best thing about our website is the community. We’re an independent website, and we publish a lot of opinion articles compared to other news sites. That’s why we’re adding the ability to vote on articles with the latest update.
If you find an article interesting, agree with an article or think that an article should be featured on the front page, you can vote for that article – and if you don’t find an article interesting, or don’t agree with an article or don’t think that article shouldn’t featured on the front page, you can simply downvote that article.
[shunno-quote]Find an article interesting? Upvote it.[/shunno-quote]
So where and how is the article ranking being used? We’ll be automatically featuring the top articles based on the votes on the homepage’s featured section, and recommend the most voted articles on each article. The feature just doesn’t rank the articles with the most votes, it also takes other things in consideration.
No, the feature doesn’t require you to sign up for an account or anything – you just vote. That’s it. It’s also worth noting that the votes won’t update in real-time, as we’ve added some mechanism to update it every 10 minutes so that the system doesn’t get abused.
This is one of the major features that we’re really happy to introduce with this update. Make sure to try it out today, and let us know what you think of this feature in the comment section below.
A new dark theme
With the latest update, we’re also introducing a new dark theme for the site. The dark theme looks really nice on Microsoft Edge, so make sure to check it out.
[shunno-quote]Sexier. Faster. Darker.[/shunno-quote]
To change the theme of the site, just head over to Settings page by clicking here. So what’s new? As I said, it’s a whole new color scheme. We’ve mainly focused on improving the performance, however. With the latest update, the dark theme is much, much faster.
Feedback
This is probably the biggest update to Microsoft News so far. We’ve allowed a few of our readers test it, and we’ve fixed most of the known bugs – but that doesn’t mean that there are no bugs on the latest update. If you’ve noticed any bugs, or want to send us feedback, you can do so by heading over to this page, emailing me at [email protected] or tweeting me @mehedih_. We really appreciate your feedback, and we’ll try our best to fix bugs and improve the site with your bug reports and feedback to improve the site’s quality for everyone else.
Conclusion
