Nathan and I started thinking about a new design for AVC a few months ago and I blogged about it. We got a ton of great comments from all of you which we read through carefully. We also used a heatmap to determine where all of you actually engage on this blog. Not surprising, you engage with the content and the comments and not a lot else.
We were inspired by the experience of reading blogs on iPhones, Androids, and iPads. We like the clean, crisp experience of a single column of text and not much else.
We are launching it today. So welcome to minimalist AVC. I love Nathan's work and I love the new design. I hope you all do too.
A few things to note:
1) We've got "like" buttons on each post. You'll see them if you look at a permalink page or open up the comments. They are below the post and above the comments. Please use them to give me feedback on the posts. These like buttons are not from Faceboook, they are from Disqus.
2) Most of the widgets are gone. We've kept the ad unit which produces tens of thousands of dollars for charity every year. It will take a little while for FM to get decent ads into the new rectangular ad unit and for a little bit we'll have remnant stuff. And we've kept the Meetups Everywhwere widget. I see that as a feature of this community, not a widget.
3) We've added a video page. You can get to it via the nav bar at the top of the blog. We are using Magnify to power this and we are piggy backing on the Union Square Ventures video page. The AVC video page is a little thin right now but I will work to fill it out over time.
4) The link to traffic/audience stats is still available but we've moved it to the footer of the page in keeping with our desire for minimalism.
Let us know what you think.
