About Our Redesign
We recently redesigned ninite.com and I wanted to give some background on why we did it and what our goals were. Here are some screenshots of the old site to compare with.
The main idea behind the change was to make the site more readable and simple to understand.
We found that the old light text over a dark background was difficult to focus on. The bulk of text at the top of the page just invited users to skip it entirely. And our large background image could be slow to load and a performance nightmare over remote access or VNC. But the root of it is that text-heavy pages just weren’t easy to read before. We tested the new design on our help site for a couple weeks before converting everything to it since it is the most text-heavy part of ninite.com.
By stripping the page down to the basics I think we’ve accomplished a number of positive things. The site loads faster because there are fewer images to download. By letting the bullet points about what Ninite does flow down the side instead of get skipped at the top we seem to be communicating with users much more effectively. We get far fewer simple questions that are explained on the front page these days.
We were getting an incredible number of “Does it install 64-bit apps?” and similar questions before when this was literally the second thing on the page. (Yes, Ninite does install 64-bit apps automatically when appropriate.)
We also moved to a more traditional toolbar-on-top layout instead of the old links to the Linux version, etc. being on the bottom. This seems to fit better with the standard website layouts users are familiar with and makes the site easier to navigate.
It’s definitely still a work in progress, but we’re happy with the results so far. We’ll be experimenting with the design more over the next few weeks. As always, we do read and respond (when you leave an email) to all our feedback, so let us know what you think. Thanks!
