ZURB, a well-regarded interaction design and strategy firm in the San Francisco Bay Area that has in the past done work for eBay, Facebook, Yahoo, Zazzle and many other familiar names, regularly publishes insightful design deconstruction posts for homepages of some of the most popular websites on the net, using its very own Notable app (also see our review of the website feedback tool).
After taking a critical look at CNN.com, MSN.com and Twitter.com, the ZURB team has recently shined its light on TechCrunch.com. And we took notice.
The best way to check out what ZURB had to say about our homepage design – which has been live since Summer 2008 when we did a major redesign for the second time – is to visit this full-page screenshot, where you can hover over their notes to see what feedback the team had to give.
Apart from the visual aspect, the Notable page also allows you to check out the code, content and SEO elements of a website, and you can download the whole critique as a PDF straight from the app without the need to register.
Just for the record, we agree with nearly everything the ZURB team had to say about our homepage design, both the good and the bad. No design is perfect, but we like to think we’ve struck a good balance between making it as easy as possible for readers to check out our content, while giving advertisers valuable real estate that doesn’t interfere with the editorial.
We’re committed to making the experience even better, so note that we are currently working on an entirely new template and design for TechCrunch.
Stay tuned, and in the meantime, do let us know what you think about the current design.
I think it’s really functional – except on mobile. Slow to load on 3G and even when zoomed in on post’s body text, the text feels a little small. How much of a percentage of your traffic comes from mobile – any thought on optimising for this? All in all, great work, and definitely looking forward to the new design, whenever it may launch!
Working on that, too.
Looking forward to it, Robin! ETA?
this week
Great. that is my main critique … lack of a simple mobile css file! at least start there.
I like the design of the website very much. I love how it shows up on my cell phone. Very easy to read (I use Opera’s browser)
I would suggest you get Opera and view the web on your cell phone
Wow, I actually expect this to be extremely interesting. Hope they’re not bullshit.
whatever you do, don’t be inspired by engadget’s new design, it sucks, and causes your browsers to crash!
I agree completely.
Would agree with call for experimenting with footer.
21. Page is way too big. Firebug reports that the home page alone is 1.28 MB in size (including assets), totaled 190 requests for all files and ads, and took 21.41 seconds to load on a late-model iMac on a respectable broadband connection. The requests to the slow ad servers added nearly 10 seconds onto the page load time.
I have that 190 number etched on my desktop. its going down. big time.
That is excellent news. It looks like there is a good deal of CSS/JS which could use some expires headers and gzipping.
I highly recommend using:
http://www.webpagetest.org/test
There is an auto refresh on the homepage.. why?
It’s a pet peeve of mine. I load up a favorite bookmarks folder in the morning, I notice that the tab reloads itself a few times before I even get to it.
If I really wanted the bleeding edge latest version, id hit the browser refresh button before reading.
Whats the reason for it? And can you remove it pls
I am curious as to how the new website will look. I am also curious as to how your advertisers feel about it… especially that dual ad you guys have on the side where a 120 x 600 and a 230 x 600 ads are next to each other.
its one my favorite and most functional website…
Sara
http://www.isopurewater.com/
This is an interesting take on the design. Wondering if they can also do this to our site. Techcrunch could always work much hard on cross promoting all their content. However, thats the same as most sites.
To be honest I found that advice to be a mixed bag of simplistic design ideas and ridiculousness.
“Removing the dotted line to the right might increase ad click through rate” – that’s great – but having a picture of a donkey’s ass next to it ‘might’ also increase ad click through rate.
“Having a better footer might increase traffic” … but how bout this instead? Having ‘a slightly different copyright logo in the bottom right hand corner might increase site traffic’.
Seriously – I know there’s no way for them to know without doing A/B or multivariate testing on your site which they can’t do just by observing – but some of the ‘might’ recommendations really are daft.
“Sending me $1,000 might increase your site traffic $$$”
Oh Rly?
Ramzi-
Many of the ideas are simple- these are often the ones left on the table that create the most opportunity.
Without truly knowing the business goals, it’s hard to really know the intent of many of the decisions. Most of the feedback is given based on our experience.
I can tell you that our work has proven that even simple line changes can increase revenue by 40% on a page. A/B testing is the only way to truly validate these ideas.
Bryan
You rock Brian – and I whole heartedly understand the power of simple changes within web design and how underestimated it usually is. I’ve seen an example of powerful Accenture ADO Multivariate web design testing to squeeze out every %age of design efficiency to improve specified business metrics and was blown away.
My overly harsh criticism simply stems from the open endedness of these ‘might’ type of comments as you could extend this to pretty much anything.
Changing the font to Verdana on the site ‘might’ increase repeat visits.
Changing the background colour to purple ‘might’ increase the duration of time spent on site.
Without the context of your experience specifically showing how a dotted line next to an ad unit being removed can increase ad CTRs – the comments really do look quite needle in a haystack/flippant.
Much love!
Who cares?
We all read it in RSS.
1+ for Jakob!
The website is so slow. All the (no offense) useless javascript and advertising crap around the content so heavy that I only read it through Google Reader… except when I comment.
One way to make MY experience better would be to ban scientology ads from Google Adsense for this site. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I was greeted by two massive scientology ads this morning on TechCrunch.
if you see an ad coming through on adsense that may not be right, please send me links, either ad or destination – nik at tc
I saw it again on the “Achtung” article today. Linked to http://www.thewaytohappiness.org/?source=ga&gclid=CIuh64CFpJ4CFU0A4wodRW8Rlg#/home
Very nice and informative review, I also read the posts in RSS but I come here often to comment on good articles. I wish the retweet, facebook, etc. bar would be in RSS, I would repost the articles a lot more.
I really like the fact that the report contains a balance between engaging users with content and making advertising more effective. However, I don’t like reading usability/design audits with results that contain the word “might” in it. It infers opinion. Any change “may/might” improve something or make it worse.
Johnk-
Balancing the ‘user needs’ with the ‘business goals’ is critical to growing an online presence. It’s always in fluctuation.
Agree with “might.” We don’t have access to TechCrunch analytics or business goals, so we’ve highlighted points based on our 10 years of experience helping companies online. A/B testing is the only way to validate opportunities.
Bryan
I’ll be honest, I rarely pay attention to the ads because there are so many of them I just regard them as crap. I know where to look now to get around the ads.
I know you must have them to make money, but what an annoyance. When I visit a site that has intentionally plugged in some ad to block my path to content, I refuse to click on the ad. Most of the ads are crap anyway!
The only thing they don’t label and discuss is the actual article. Of course for these people it’s just “content” and doesn’t matter.
Oh, so now you do “trade stories for free stuff”?
Way to take a consistent moral stance :-/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/heres-some-pr-for-you-cdnetworks/
Great sales idea from the gang at Zurb. Do some free public consulting on a big brand like TC and folks to listen. nice work
AdblockPlus makes Techcrunch.com awesome.
I like it.
You have on the right hand side Actively Discussed Posts widget.
Make a new JavaScript widget and let it scroll horizontally thought the last 24hrs or news titles. Automatically. Or I can scroll though.
Or put a widget on the very top (like the digg-bar) and let news titles scroll there though. It is sometimes so hard to keep up without a RSS reader.
I understand these guys are good at what they do, but I look at http://www.zurb.com/ and I think the text is too small, doesn’t highlight what they do well, and the image takes too much space for no added value. These guys should take there own advice.
The page needs the image, otherwise it would be all text; however, I’d rather see something that better relates to the headline.
That is, indeed, one of the worst website i have ever visited, at least from people whom call themselves “web’s pros”. No matter how good their work is, i truely hope their actual website is somekind of fake, temp page, funny joke .. really ..
I agree with the feedback regarding the TC footer. It seems like a real wasted opportunity to me.
A while back I posted how a potential redesign of the (old) footer might look: http://www.smileycat.com/miaow/archives/000992.php
It gives users a lot more options to go further into the site when they reach the bottom of the page.
ye I saw that post – thanks. it definitely is a wasted opportunity atm
On the current design, I’ve found that I never even notice the top 3 module boxes that house the featured stories. I automatically look at the headline of the latest story. Not sure what to do with that space, but it’s prime real estate.
Does anyone else bypass those modules?
“Apart from the visual aspect, the Notable page also allows you to check out the code, content and SEO elements of a website, and you can download the whole critique as a PDF straight from the app without the need to register.”
Where can you do this? There was a link at the beg. of the article but it makes you register
Here’s what i don’t like about the design.
1- 125 x 125 Ads on the side bar. TC should be creative here than dispaly just clutter.
2- TC fan box on Facebook (on the side bar). I think that’s just too unprofessional for a professional site like TC
3- The Footer – Too simplistic. It can be used and even monetized i think.
TC should try be frugal. Perhaps get some inspiration from Google home page. Yes, i agree Ads are required to survive and sustain TC, but then there must be an alternative i guess….. I’m not a design expert, but i don’t like clutter.
Sorry TC, but Gigaom looks cleaner – imho.
Though their “shuffled paper” design will probably annoy over time. It seems to distract your eyes from the content.