[Update-v1.1] What’s new in the Relaunch design?

Oct '11
26
11:55
AM
Kalpesh Mistry

Heck that roadblock! It’s been quite long time we haven’t made any updates on TechIt.in. Well, because we were committed to redesign the site and make a relaunch with it, and here we are – site was relaunched on 24th Oct. And to your surprise we have put some real good and unique features so go ahead, check them out…

Categories and Companies

The header is pretty clean in this design, because we removed category menus. Why did we remove them? Because frankly it was necessary to do so. TechIt.in is a portal which is primarily focused on “news” rather than columns and reviews. Most articles you get here would be news. Don’t misunderstand us by our “primary focus”, we do review stuff but we don’t do it everyday or every hour. Thus “news” is primary for us.

Previously we had category menus like News (submenus – mobile phones, global news, national news, apple news, google news) and like Mobile Phones (submenus – android, blackberry, ios, windows phones). Mobile Phones category generally had updates regarding apps, and specific OS device launch – so basically it was news aswell :\ . And so we started to edit all articles (er… those were 1265 articles in total) placing them all under new “more-specific” categories. Since whatever we write here is news, News category no longer exists. And there exists no subcategory for any categories aswell. Overall the site has 55 categories as of now, and the number may increase in future. But the point is you get specific information from specific category from now on.

But where are all those categories listed? Well, we have included a different page on site for listing all categories. And it’s called Browse. It’s unique, because here you find all categories linked with their archived page along with RSS feed link. Browse loads fast because of the exclusion of various scripts, sidebar and contents as compared to the homepage.

And one most unique feature in Browse is Companies. We’ve not just tried to classify each article more-specific, but we’ve also made each of those ultra-specific. If the article relates to any product which relates to a company it gets classified by the company name. Companies tab on Browse contains top eight companies (according to number of articles on the site) listed with their descriptions – this list includes some very known names like Google, Apple, Samsung, Nvidia, etc. But in case you’re looking for articles of more specific companies than these, “Show all companies” button helps you to bring down the long list of 183 companies. And because the list is ever increasing, you can make use of the search input placed on top right of the Companies tab which shows results in real time.

So from now each article shows up its related category and related company. Hope you like it!

Recent in Top Categories’ Box

For more ease, not letting you to jump on to Browse from homepage, that is when you’re in need to read articles from some specific categories (some top categories, in fact), we’ve added Top Categories’ Box on homepage. It’s got 8 top categories each showing 3 recent articles. It’s right below the fancy featured slider. First 4 categories are shown on 1st slide, whereas other 4 on other slide of Top Categories’ Box.

Highlights

There’s a long trailing list of 20 recent articles on homepage (which is important for a weblog). And that’s where we thought about Highlights. Highlights is a sidebar widget made especially for homepage. Highlights has 3 recent articles that are in the list of 20, that are quite trending to be highlighted. Thus you can know 3 recent important news from Highlights itself.

Today’s fact

Just when you’re up anywhere on site… seeing an article, you can probably know more about something else (related to technology ofc) from Today’s fact widget. For spreading this intuitional knowledge, we update our FB and Twitter accounts’ status with the fact, everyday.

Top bar

You already know about the floating top bar. It’s nice with the design and links you with our Twitter and Facebook pages (if you wish to connect for mobile updates). And that is how we’ve excluded those annoying HTML iframes of FB/Twitter (that consumes your bandwidth, and increases site’s load time) from the sidebar.

Voice search for Chrome!

For Google Chrome lovers and users, the site includes Google’s speech-to-text on the search input. You can now search without bashing your keyboard (if only it can recognize your accent properly :P ) when visiting the site from Chrome.

Latest / Breaking news real-time notification

Now you know about that clean part of the bar on header where search input lies. That part is used to notify you the latest article published (within 30 mins of publishing time) on site. It updates real-time. If the article bears “Breaking” tag, the notification will tell you that it’s a breaking news. This is how you don’t miss an important update when you’re already reading out an older one.

The website is optimised for a good desktop experience, and low speed broadband connection (and we’re still on tweaking stuff for more optimisation). While using many JQuery scripts, we’ve made some good use of CSS3 aswell. Highlights, for example is complete CSS3, there’s no script used by Highlights for the animation you see on standard supportive browsers. And we’ve done the same for many other portions of the design. Obviously the design isn’t made for mobile phone browsers. And thus (to make the site fast and accessible) you’ll get a different theme when opening site from mobile phones and tablets.

We really hope you like the redesign, and we would really like you to comment here for any feedback and anything you want to say. Your suggestions can help us to make the design and features better :)

And if you really like the design and our thoughts, recommend the site to others:

(Note: We are not designers/web-developers by profession. Google leads a key role for helping us :P )

v1.1 – 27-02-2012:

We tried many stuff to make the site unique on the relaunch happened few months ago, some of those features are listed above. But we always felt that the homepage was a bit unfinished, especially when it came to DESIGN.

TechIt.in v1.1 adds some designing goodness on the homepage. This version majorly changed the looks of Top Categories’ Box on homepage. It now takes smaller space on the page, and matches with rest of the design. We’ve again made use of CSS3 in the making of this design, no Javascript-ing used. Hope you guys like this new look of the homepage.