Shortly after this post is published, you’ll notice something very different. Namely, our entire site.
That’s right: after many years, we’re finally refreshing the site’s design. It’s a huge process that has involved a whole amount of work from our dev team, and as a result you’re going to notice a few things different.
The change is visual only at this point, and there will be a couple of features that won’t be activated straight away. If you’re a regular, you’ll notice you won’t get comment notifications or the ability to adjust your user profile — but they’ll be coming shortly after.
Because a lot of things under the hood have been completely overhauled, you might notice a few bugs or things out of place. If you’re reading an article and something isn’t where it should be, please leave a comment back here in this post to help us track the bug. Again in the comments below is best instead of via Talk Amongst Yourselves, tweeting or emailing us. Thanks!
Comments
92 responses to “The New Kotaku Australia Is Here!”
All the best to the dev team!
Quick! Look busy!
As long as you don’t ruin it like the USA Kotaku, go for it.
I’ll work my arse off to do the best job I can, that I promise.
Looking forward to the update.
Seems to be no way to get to my profile (or anyone else’s) currently. Is it not implemented yet or am I missing the new way of doing it?
It mentions it somewhere in the article I think. A couple of features aren’t activated yet, with the profile being one of them.
Odd, when I first read the article that part wasn’t there. Fair enough then.
God speed little doode!
Couple of things
– way too much white space on the left of these comments (in fact the whole site is just very very white all round)
– i liked seeing number of comments listed with each story on the front page. if something i was not that interested in had a reasonable number of comment i would still click into that story to read the comments (see what all the fuss is about)
– not a huge fan of the auto-playing gifs/videos of articles on the front page. auto-moving stuff of any nature is very distracting.
– may just be me, but seems very slow to load. it is taking some 20-25 seconds to start loading. may just be me of course, but i am not seeing that with other sites. Clicking More Stories also has this same long delay (at least for me, also submitting a comment) – #seems to be fixed now
– not a huge fan of the ‘section’ heads at the top immediately popping open like a scene from a horror movie as i simply move my mouse over them on the way up to the address bar. maybe just add a small delay to the pop out time, 0.5 seconds or something?
– feels weird to me that everything is just about 10% to the right, not centered on the screen
– also when editting a comment it seems to revert to HTML mode, where (br) and (/p)’s for example are all thru the comment. Not sure if that is intentional. Not a prob really for me since i’m a web dev but I can see it causing issues for others who might remove such tags, not knowing what they are/do.
– also comments that are edited no longer seem to add a tag Last edited: (date/time) so cannot tell if/when a post has been edited.
Just FYI I have been around a number sites over the last few years that feel the need to revamp their site (understandable, I guess) and every single one has just BAM dropped it on their users out of no-where, and in every case it was not well received to be honest.
Why can sites not mention they have a new site coming, and have a link to the newly redesigned site from the old site, so users can visit it and check it out and offer constructive comments to get it in a READY state BEFORE dropping an incomplete site on its users out of the blue?
Just doesn’t make sense to me. Your users ARE your site, you should appreciate them and their input on such massive changes as complete site re-designs and should get their input BEFORE a complete change over, where you are left scrambling to fix things/change things on a live, active site, annoying the very people you depend on, the users.
(just a couple of examples are digg, slashdot, arstechnica – though arstechnica has done a great job since their redesign, in listening and their site is great again now IMO, diggs user base dropped like a stone and is now pretty much dead in the water, and slashdot completely abandoned their redesign I think)
Just my 2 cents.
I really just don’t understand why sites, that depend on their users frequently visiting, do NOT get their users inputs/ideas/suggestions BEFORE going live with a completely revamped site instead of after…?
But anyways we will see what happens over the next few days.
Make sure to thank/assist your dev team, I am sure they will be having a very busy time of it the next few days.
Hey mate, thanks for the lengthy response. I can’t fully answer everything, but you’re welcome to pitch any features or ideas and we can have them added into the site going forward. It’s not always possible to do everything in a single shot like you suggest; I’m sure some developers around these traps can tell you some stories.
In any case, I’m going to be helping them as much as I humanly can. And I definitely haven’t forgotten to thank them. Change is never easy.
Thanks for the reply, I can already see that the response time of the page loading/commenting etc has greatly improved and seems back to normal.
Like I said, main thing to me is why it’s all kept secret from your users that a redesigned site is coming until bam! you drop it one day from nowhere and that’s it. If you let people know that a change is coming they are generally much, much more accepting of it.
Will keep an eye on things over the next few days. Good luck all 🙂
Good comment Deathcake.
We had been playing with the idea of releasing a beta version of the site for you guys to play around with.
However, with deadlines looming, setting up a beta version to run alongside a regular version of the same site was going to take us on quite a detour which would likely result in less polish being applied before release. In addition to this, since the beta version wouldn’t be using the exact environment conditions as the live site, it would be liable to introducing additional bugs once the environment was switched.
We do particularly value the feedback from the Kotaku audience, which is the primary reason we’ve launched Kotaku first. Please keep the feedback coming.
Understandable Rob, however even if a Beta page is not possible, I believe it is still well worth a notification to users that a site revamp is incoming, perhaps a week or so before.
For me its kinda like coming home after work to find someone has been over to your place during the day and re-painted it, removed some walls, moved others, and replaced your deck without notice 😛
Could be wrong, but I think it was arstechnica that had the old and new side by side for a while when they just dumped it on people. You could pretty much switch between the two for a couple of weeks, and people had the opportunity to get used to it over time.
I dont remember anyone grumbling about that 🙂
Yo, any chance of comments being posted asynchronously, like up/downvotes are? The page reloading when I comment sucks. Also, giant success message for upvotes is distracting
At one of my previous companies, the redesign was outsourced (despite us having our own dev department), and we got word of the redesign and the new look pretty late in the game. Like, when it launched. We found a tonne of bugs just by clicking around and it wasn’t a great design any way…
I Agree with everything you’ve said.
Extra emphasis on wanting to see number of comments on the front page, and the section to the left is way too wide.
I read this site at work and need chrome 50% screen size at max so I can see things processing in the background. With the window that small the actual content is way too off centre.
*addnote – just made the window a tiny bit thinner and the whole left column disappears. This is better
I’m also unable to up-vote comments. This may not be the new design, I think I haven’t been able to do that for a few months. Browsing on Chrome Version 54.0.2840.71 m
I’ve also had the same issue for months now, buttons have been clickable but don’t register upvotes/down votes. No adblocker, happens in Firefox and chrome (mobile too)
Agree on all, particularly seeing how many comments on each article!
Okay looks like I can post again without getting an HTTP user/pass authentication challenge so that’s good. Things I’ve noticed:
– Page loading is dog slow. Like, I can nearly measure it in minutes slow. Page caching not working yet perhaps?
– RSS is broken. http://feeds.kotaku.com.au/KotakuAustralia Has not updated since the post before this one.
– There is no longer a way to get RSS on specific tags. I used to be able to have a feed that just had the Australian content because it’s better than the US site’s stuff.
Is there a timeline to fixing the RSS issue?
I love the Australian content, but now I’m forced to wade through the US stuff. I’m getting close to cleaning my feeds.
I hate this layout. It’s the main reason I come to Kotaku AU rather than Kotaku US. There’s too much white space and the articles on the main page aren’t centered.
What do you have against the left side of the screen that means it has to just be white space?
the left side of the screen is where the ads go.
– I like the new header bar with drop downs linking straight to articles, this could be a good feature (as long as the articles there rotate quickly and don’t become stale
– The white space on the left of the comments is horrible. There’s way too much of it and it makes the page feel cramped.
– Is there a quick way to get to the other sites (Gizmodo, etc)? I actually used the links at the top of the page whenever I wanted to check those sites out. Feels like you’ve now made it harder to get to those sites.
– This is still a new change. It’ll take some time to get past the “Aaargh! It’s not what I’m used to!”
Ok, I’ve read a few more articles and have some additional feedback/questions:
– The white space on the elft of the screen is horrible. It’s a single column dedicated to “Give us your email address” and “contact us”. You don’t need to block off 30% of the page for that.
– Is the site whiter than before? Was the old site grey? I don’t know why, but reading this site feels like I’m staring into the sun. It’s way too bright.
– Is anyone else finding that there’s a huge white gap between the articles and the comments?
– The more I read, the more I dislike the new layout. The left column and new font make it feel like Kotaku is using the old “maybe if I play with the margins and make the font bigger, the teacher won’t notice I’m 500 words under the word limit”
I’d mirror pretty much all these comments….
Mostly – Please bring back the links to Gizmodo, Lifehacker, etc. I used to bounce across all of them in one browse…now I am going to have to use bookmarks…and my bookmarks are a mess….
Same here. Those links made for a convenient one stop shop across a range of topics. I’m quite hit and miss with Business Insider, which has the most to do with my job, because it doesnt directly link back at the top of the page.
Just keep that header bar, and I can get used to the rest. Even the massive whitespace on the left, which serves no purpose once you scroll down more than a couple of pages…
Burn it
Burn it now
Acutally, I don’t mind it. I like the new font – very clean and easy to read.
Good luck today getting the bugs worked through – these transitions always have a few bumps!
HI all,
I agree with some of the other users:
The layout is questionable with regards to the body of the text being aligned with so much negative space on the left
The load times *do* seem to be longer
The number of comments per article count was a genuine guide as to how interesting an article was
I’ll attempt to use this new design as a frequent site but without changes (that layout for starters) I don’t see this staying in my favorites tab.
Sorry guys 🙁
I second this and everyone else’s comments regarding the body of text alignment.
just wondering if this will fully integrate with Kinja? cause I may as well look forward to using my Kinja account rather than this one in the future.
Nope, there are zero plans to integrate with Kinja.
hahaha. good 🙂
Just pointing out a minor bug, the old “Kotaku International” link at the bottom of each page now says Gizmodo International, though when you click it, it still comes up with the 3 Kotaku links though. Of those 3 links though, US works, Brazil goes to Gizmodo Brazil and Japan goes to Kotaku US again.
Not exactly top priority but just noticed it 😛
Edit: I’m not a huge fan of the massive white spaces either but I did just check the site on my phone and the new site seems to look great on there at least.
Enjoying the new look. Very well done and so far I haven’t encountered a problem. However my only bit of criticism would have to be the content from US and UK Kotaku. I come here for Australian content and often click on an article only to find its for US or UK readers. Just something to think on.
Not new with the redesign or anything, but all the Aussie content (and nothing else) goes in the au tag: http://www.kotaku.com.au/tags/au/
I’ll get used to the design eventually, but not having a count of comments on the article is terrible.
Heaps of articles I only clicked through for the comments and then would go back and read the article.
We’ll get this implemented in a later revision.
Couldn’t log in for a long while and i hate the drop down box from the top menu. Alot of white wasted sapce too but i guess ads should be there.
My main concern is that there is too much white space, it’s always been my issue with Kotaku US as well.
Basically, you have:
* A large block of white space at the top of the page, between the ‘pinned’ articles, and the start of the article
* An almost 1 page sized block of white space between the bottom of the article and the comments section (I assume this change was to ‘separate’ the opinions of Kotaku from the opinions of the readers. But a HR element would do just as well.
* The entire left side of the page is useless, wasted space. I assume this was designed for mobile devices? Considering what the CSS of the site says, you are literally wasting 1/3 of the screen space.
I also feel your articles are too big (on the front page that is), each article is about a screen height high (If there is an image), which means a lot of scrolling just to see what news there are.
One final thing (which could just be a timing thing), I tried to reset my password, and the email has yet to come through.
Looks WAY to much like the US counterpart now, and that’s not great. To much white space, to much emptiness. Ads between comments and the article are silly, and I don’t understand why any site puts them there, as it breaks the flow of the article and its proceeding convo with ads no one looks at. Then again, this is becoming more like a click-bate site than an ACTUAL news site, so it is a logical move that you would want to look like one… Or was that just a coincidences?
Is this thing on?
We fear change.
On a serious note though, something about the article/comments/all meaningful content pushed up on the right feels very cluttered and hard to casually read. Couple that with the larger font and on this 13″ MacBook it’s a bit of a nightmare. When opening this article, there are 13 words that I can actually read before having to scroll. And it’s interesting that I noticed that because I just double checked Giz and I can’t read a single word when the page opens there, yet it still feels better. Maybe it’s just the familiarity and my first post, made in jest, was actually more accurate than anything I’ve written here!
Thanks you so much for removing the paging as you scroll. That was my biggest complaint about the UX on this site, having to wait several seconds while the next set of articles loaded. I like what else you’ve done with the site too. Any chance of a dark theme?
Agreed with that one, was even worse on my phone, seemed to take ages to load anything after the first few articles, works a lot better now.
I’ll echo a bunch of the comments here – way too white on a desktop (makes me think there’s missing assets?), tho mobile is fine I guess (tho it does feel a little… sterile?). Don’t know what font you’re using for the comments entry textbox, but it’s about half the size of the comments, and I’m having to squint to read it – as someone who prefers to proofread and spellcheck my comments, that is somewhat frustrating and a bit taxing on the eyes (especially combined with the extremely white background). Don’t particularly mind the negative space on the left, but the comments in general have way too much wasted space (or maybe the font size is too large) – on a 1080p screen, I can barely see two comments above this entry box. And the flashing header/link box at the top when I move my mouse past it to the address bar needs a delay – especially because it takes up so much of the screen, the abrupt and significant brightness change it can cause can be disorienting. And animated content in article title images… please, stop. It’s distracting at best, motion-sickness inducing at worst.
What an emotional rollercoaster that was. First I was worried it going to end up like Kotaku US, then that’s exactly what happened. Then I realised I was just being redirected to Kotaku US while the site was down, phew. Then it came back and it looked like Kotaku US :p
Right now my biggest complaint is that I’m being forced onto the mobile site on my phone, and the button at the bottom of the page to switch back is no longer there, nor can I force it by appending the old ?action=swith_layout&layout=desktop to the URL (also minor bug, if I do then try to click to the next page of comments, it doesn’t take me to the page but just appends the comment page part to the end of the URL assuming there aren’t any parameters there). The main reason this annoys me is that I the mobile site hides the voting info on the comments, I want to see what others think of what’s being said as I scroll and having to manually examine every individual one is stupid. Also in general things just tend to be too large on the mobile site, it’s much more comfortable to view and navigate the desktop site for the most part.
Otherwise I echo most of what others say, the huge white space on the left is weird and makes things feel cramped, the site feels very white and lacks the darker contrast that made the old one more comfortable to look at. And the lack of comment counts on the front page is a huge mistake. Will have to take another look on the PC later to see what else is there.
Not sure which mobile browser you’re using these days, but Chrome has a “Request desktop site” option in the browser menu. Not sure if it saves between sessions. I think Opera and FF have a similar option, but haven’t used them on mobile…
I use Opera Mini mostly, which makes most sites usable for me. It doesn’t have that option though, that’s only in Opera Mobile and all the javascript (and that damn floating toolbar, also any pop up boxes that auto move as soon as you zoom or scroll) makes it pretty chuggy and unusable.
Regardless, forcing users to change things based on what you think is best for them and giving them no way to decide for themselves irks me something awful. Currently if I try and browse eBay from here I get redirected to this page: pages.ebay.com.au/mobile/wap.html
Absolute horse shit.
(here’s hoping the reply attaches this time)
About a third of the screen width is taken up by the side bar. Everything is off centre. This is way too big.
Then you have the menu bar up the top that stays with us. It would be great if that tucked away as you scroll down. It leaves a really small window for content in combination with the side bar.
On the main page, you can only see one article at a time with the huge images. And please, don’t having playing GIFS for article headliners.
I’m glad the collapsing header section is gone: that really screwed up “page down” behaviour. When you hit the key, it was as if the header collapsed revealing a bit more content, and then moved down by a page, so you’d skip over a few lines of text in the story.
Can i actually comment on the page now? last night i tried to comment but kept getting asked for my login details.
Altough im sure it will grow on me
Also, the login form is sending passwords over unencrypted HTTP. I’m sure you could log in over HTTPS at some point in the past, but now even going to https://www.kotaku.com.au just redirects you to the unencrypted site.
Catch phrase!
Ah, it’s fixed. Last night the site kept demanding login credentials even though I was already logged in.
Hello contestants.
Minor thing, it might be fixed now:
Using Chrome, even while logged in, I was getting that Chrome-style ‘Authentication Required’ dropdown box that needed my credentials for the site.
It’d then go to an error page.
Good luck!
Edit: mobile reply fail
Oh noes, Kotaku Aus has been Kinja’d
Edit… anyone using ublock origin that has a huge blank space between the end of the article and the comments just use the picker tool and block the two elements and the comment section should now be right below the article.
Please please implement a ‘Night Mode’. I agree with all the other commenters that there is too much white-space and no options for changing it to our own preferences.
Too much white space.
Too much white.
Too much like the US site.
It’s lost its Kotaku Australia identity.
At least add some more colour, like the pink, it seems to be the secondary colour. Kotaku’s colour, as it were.
Also I’m not a big fan of this new font.
I thought the whitespace thing was just my adblocker, so I opened site in IE, and nope still heaps of white space.
Yeah, I’d agree with some of the other comments that everything being over to the right, and offset by such a big side bar, is disconcerting.
Having things centred, or even on the left hand side of the page, would be better to read.
I also miss the easily-accessible links to the partner sites. Most of the time when I go to Gizmodo or Lifehacker, it’s from here.
and how am i meant to go to lifehacker or gizmodo,
its fucking aweful, who okayed this design
Can you please return the links up top to the other pages, likehacker, business insider, gizmodo etc etc. i browse from one to the other.
Generally I don’t mind it. But there’s one thing I’d like: to see the current votes on comments on the mobile site. I don’t mind using a menu for voting myself but it’s just a good way to scan through and see the comments voted up or down by more than 5 for when I’m busy. I know the old version didn’t do that either.
One more thing, when you go to page 2 -> of the comments, it flips to the top of the article, not just the 2nd page of comments, annoying to have to scroll down thru the whole article again. need the next page link to go to #comments not #toppage.
Also Trending Articles on the left is currently more a list of simply ‘most recent articles’ or surely else this article would be #1 on that list…
Agreed with comment pagination – we’ll get this added.
As for trending articles, it is indeed showing the articles that are trending.
isn’t this the same look as the US kotaku site?
Not a fan of the look of the US version either
whats with all the unused white space and huge article images that look 800px wide?
try refining and tightening things up.
simply put, this new site design is fucking terrible. so much wasted space designed for usless ads that get removed anyway by Ublock and Adblock and then theres the massive gap between the end of an article and the start of comments that is also used as ad space making it a massive pain in the arse when view on a mobile. and finally the page isnt even centered.
Initial impressions, I’m not liking this new format at all sorry. It would have been good to have some sort of heads up, I remember you guys did it last time you re-vamped the site.
I probably sound like a broken record here, but wayyyy too much white space. For a good use of space check out the Polygon website. It wouldn’t hurt to tile article links (with bigger tiles for featured stories) and the articles themselves being centered with proper wrapping around pictures. Also what’s with the inconsistent text size? The links at the top are smaller than the text in the article and comments, and the comment box text is smaller yet. It just feels messy an inconsistent. The animation of that top menu bar should also have a smoother scroll out animation instead of just pop out like that.
Sorry if I sound nitpicky but I think you guys have one of the better gaming communities online and really want you guys to have a kick ass website with good UI & UX. Speaking of communities is there any idea of adding messageboard functionality? like the Whirlpool forums but for gaming. TAY seems quite popular even if I’m not a part of it, would be great to be able to have messageboards for things like community reviews, gaming tips, dr nerdlove advice etc.
Seems to be a left sidebar rendering issue in Safari Version 10.0 (12602.1.50.0.10) on MacOS Sierra 10.12, can’t confirm whether its associated with webkit generally or not (don’t have time). Happens only within articles. Left sidebar is not sized correctly to fill space and appears squashed with overflow hidden – issue appears to be with the em and section elements. Happy to provide a screenshot.
Happens in: http://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/10/apple-just-leaked-the-new-macbook-pro/
Not a comment on the design itself, but while you’re at it could you add the “watch later” button on youtube embeds? Every other site I visit has it except here, gizmodo and lifehacker, and it’s irritating to have to go to youtube to add a video to my watch later list
I didn’t realise that could be a thing. I often read the articles at work and flag videos to watch when I get home, so this would be a great addition for me too.
This seems to be due to them loading the videos using the “showinfo=0” flag, which hides the title header at the top of the video. If you remove that using DOM Inspector, the extra buttons appear in the top right when playing the video.
In that case I’d like to put in a request to have that flag dropped, because I like seeing the title of what I’m supposed to be watching to help decide if I need to watch it or not 😛
One small suggestion for the buttons at the bottom of the page…
“Previous page” and “More stories” don’t really give an indication of which page has articles you haven’t read yet. Perhaps “Older articles” / “Newer articles” would be better?
Have to say that I’m not a fan of the redesign. With all the white space (which presumably is there for more ad space), the site now has the appearance of those click-bait sites you click on to read about media gossip.
It also has made the site look more like every other website out there, rather than looking unique on it’s own. A shame.
Looked far superior with the previous design.
As another note, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of notification if or when a comment has been edited any more.
Don’t worry, that feature will be returning soon.
seconding most of the complaints here – the flat, oversized design which seems so popular nowadays for mobiles (and that stupid sidebar arrangement) means that, as a desktop user I will eventually use a Firefox plugin to force a custom css layout (assuming all the site functionality is restored) or otherwise stop bothering with the site so much in the first place.
That may be the road to true prosperity that you experienced, and then for your
family. It’s the main difference between being ordinary and being extra ordinary.
The first-time his empire collapsed, he used his business
contacts and knowledge, and created The Apprentice show.
Oh yeah large thumbnails on the front page are way too huge, stretching them out to fill the column width makes them take up far too much of the page vertically so it’s harder to scroll through and read the titles comfortably. And forgot to mention that I’ve always found that one part of the Gizmodo site with the drop-down menu for Dick Smith or whatever to be super annoying, and the one on here is too, popping up pretty much every time I bring my mouse down from doing anything with tabs at all. Keep ending up stuck on there and having to pick my mouse up for that extra vertical movement to get off it.
a delay on the tabs up top would be nice, if my mouse hovers over it for just a split second I have to move the mouse to the bottom of the screen if I want the pop up box to disappear, just a little annoying when reading an article. other than that I mostly like it. does feel a little empty with all the white but I’m sure that will change when your adds are up and running again?
I am pretty happy with the new design.
My only gripe was that the search feature has gone AWOL and then I could not search for this article to leave feedback so had to send a message via Facebook despite recalling that the post had said to leave feedback in the comments here and not via social media.
I did send a message on Facebook and was delighted today to find the search feature is back so well done and thank you for asking and listening to feedback and implementing it when possible 🙂
I might just be going blind but where is the search bar???
Can you please bring it back!
I often see an article and want to come back later and read it, I remember the title but now I cant find it unless I’m lucky in google.
Cheers
I still find this new site to be WAY too white. Seriously, you have 16 million (or something) distinct colours to pick from, and decide that it needs to be pure white across the entire site (except a small light grey area when composing a comment)?
Also, intentional or not, but if you write a comment in triangle brackets, it gets dropped/not parsed (these are fine) triangle ones are ignored/stripped.
I’d show you, but yeah, triangle brackets (above comma and full stop) and everything between them are removed.