(no subject)
Lists of Bests has been bought over by The Robot Co-op, the company who owns/runs 43 Things, 43 Places and All Consuming. And I usually don't feel strongly one way or the other about changes to website designs or functionality, but the new Lists of Bests really sorta sucks.
The old site used to be very clean and plain and simple, no fancy graphics, no overbearing design. Just lots of lists - things like Best Album Grammy winners or Booker Prize winners or AFIs 100 Best American Films, those sorts of lists - with checkboxes so you could mark the ones you'd read/listened to/seen and links to Amazon so you could buy those you hadn't. Some user stats so you could see which items were most popular or which users had seen/read/listened to the most things. And a feedback form so you could recommend lists you thought were missing (I recommended the Orange Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prizes) Nothing fancy. Not a site you'd visit everyday, but one which suited its purpose perfectly.
The new Lists of Bests is (1)ugly (2)busy (3)inaccurate (I don't think that Pride and Prejudice or Tristam Shandy have ever been recipients of the Booker Prize) and (4) harder to use. On top of that it has (5) lost the ability to view stats easily, if at all, and (6) acquired a whole set of features that I suppose are intended to make it more of a community site along the lines of 43 Things, but which just seem ridiculous and pointless and overdone. Not to mention that I lost all the data that I had stored at Lists of Bests previously. Bah. I don't like it. Maybe it needs to grow on me.
Also All Consuming has been re-designed, and I think that the new design is ugly. But it does make the community aspect of that site more evident and somewhat easier to understand and use, so it serves its purpose. But I still think it's kind of ugly (they were aiming for "retro" or "kitsch", maybe, but they hit closer to "tacky").
I have honestly never been so shaken up by a website re-design/re-structuring before. It's rather perturbing.
The old site used to be very clean and plain and simple, no fancy graphics, no overbearing design. Just lots of lists - things like Best Album Grammy winners or Booker Prize winners or AFIs 100 Best American Films, those sorts of lists - with checkboxes so you could mark the ones you'd read/listened to/seen and links to Amazon so you could buy those you hadn't. Some user stats so you could see which items were most popular or which users had seen/read/listened to the most things. And a feedback form so you could recommend lists you thought were missing (I recommended the Orange Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prizes) Nothing fancy. Not a site you'd visit everyday, but one which suited its purpose perfectly.
The new Lists of Bests is (1)ugly (2)busy (3)inaccurate (I don't think that Pride and Prejudice or Tristam Shandy have ever been recipients of the Booker Prize) and (4) harder to use. On top of that it has (5) lost the ability to view stats easily, if at all, and (6) acquired a whole set of features that I suppose are intended to make it more of a community site along the lines of 43 Things, but which just seem ridiculous and pointless and overdone. Not to mention that I lost all the data that I had stored at Lists of Bests previously. Bah. I don't like it. Maybe it needs to grow on me.
Also All Consuming has been re-designed, and I think that the new design is ugly. But it does make the community aspect of that site more evident and somewhat easier to understand and use, so it serves its purpose. But I still think it's kind of ugly (they were aiming for "retro" or "kitsch", maybe, but they hit closer to "tacky").
I have honestly never been so shaken up by a website re-design/re-structuring before. It's rather perturbing.