CNET unveils flexible redesign

Tech news site CNET unveiled a redesigned website on Friday.

Vice president of product Jeremy Toeman writes:

For our desktop visitors, right now you’re seeing a brand-new CNET home page, rethought, redesigned, re-everything-ed. Our mobile redesign is still in the works (and already in testing!). So not only are we doing this redesign, but, as you can see from this blog post, we’re doing it in a more transparent way.

Further, we’re going to share the why behind this — what are we thinking about, considering, and so on — as we go on this journey. Yes, we iterated and tested internally, all that good product-y stuff. But what did we want our front page to be? We had three principles driving our redesign:

1. Balance: Finding that sweet spot between content minimalism (allowing you to focus on the most critical info) and our desire to show the depth and breadth of our content. Overall, you’ll notice there’s a lot less stuff on the page compared with before.

2. Flexibility: In the layout, to tune and ultimately personalize the sections and content based on data from you, our readers. The layout you see now (Highlights, Top Stories, Latest Stories, and so on) is completely flexible.

3. Compartmentalization: Separating our content and our sponsors’ content — each have their own domains. We’re moving to using rich media to help our sponsors reach their target audience, but in a more elegant and transparent way. This is a tricky balance, but we believe we’re achieving it.

Read more here.