Let me be the first to welcome you to Ars Technica version 7.0. After nearly 14 years and six major redesigns, it’s my sincere pleasure to introduce you to the best Ars Technica yet. In what follows, I will provide an overview of what this redesign is all about. While I will address some of my favorite features of the new Ars, I can’t hit them all.

But first, here’s an update on where we are as a publication. In the four years since being acquired by Condé Nast, we have grown tremendously by honing our craft and listening to our readers. The results have been phenomenal: traffic has exploded 60 percent in that time, and unique visitors grew 67 percent. We now average a global reach of over 10 million readers, for 60 million to 80 million pageviews per month. We routinely produce stories and reviews that do more than 1 million pageviews, but our secret is that we are never afraid to spend time (and thus money) on the important stories that won’t necessarily do those huge numbers. In the end, it’s the quality of the work that matters most. With our latest redesign, we believe we have found the best way to showcase that on the Web.

Pardon us while we redecorate your house

Redesigning this website has always been an emotionally exhausting experience. The chief reason is simple: many of you have graciously, fantastically, and enthusiastically made Ars Technica your Internet home (four out of five Ars readers don’t let a day go by without visiting us). We know that a major redesign can feel like someone has broken into your house and redecorated it while you were away, but the changes we made for our seventh major redesign project should make Ars Technica even more authentic and engaging. The improvements are, we hope you’ll agree, worth the short shock of novelty.

The changes start with our new three-column front page. A manifestation of the journalistic philosophy that drives Ars Technica, the new tripartite division of content should make it easy for you to get what you want from Ars.

As a publication born before "blogs," but at the same time wholly “digitally native,” we’ve long wrestled with the question of how to best contribute to the online world with a small-but-amazing staff. From the beginning, we knew that we didn’t want to become a volume publisher, cranking out story after story. This proved to be the right call. With many of us coming out of higher education, we took a more academic approach to our work. What we most wanted to produce was solid analysis, quality arguments, and sharp writing—what we hoped to offer was “insight.” Start with that and readers would follow. (They did.)

That’s why the Ars staff has always loved long-form journalism. We've been producing long-form pieces—we call them “features”—since the first week of our existence back in the summer of 1998, long before it was fashionable (or profitable) to put long content online, where others would simply rewrite it. Our new design gives our features prime real estate: the far-right column of the site. The most recent feature story occupies an enlarged promotional spot that spans two columns near the top of the page, which allows us to draw special attention to some of our most prized work. It also gives us a better opportunity to showcase the excellent art and photography that our team (led by our creative director, Aurich Lawson) provides. And even more features are in our future.

But not every story needs a 3,000-word treatment. Our “reports," listed in the far-left column on the front page, are primarily news-driven original reporting. Typically, this represents what we consider to be the day's most important news. While we usually post only one feature a day, reports are like the day’s heartbeat. Even though we might publish 15 of these in a (very) busy day, we will do our best to combine art and photography with descriptive headlines and supporting deks (very short summaries, under the title) to highlight what is distinctive about each report.

Last but certainly not least, we have the middle column that we call “On The Radar.” Everyone on the Ars staff is obsessed with technology, which can sometimes make our stated goal of delivering to you the day's "most important" news rather difficult. Why? Because people with unhealthy obsessions with technology often manage to convince themselves that practically every story is “need to know.” But that's simply not true, and it’s incumbent on us to figure out how best to cover all of the day's news in a meaningful way. So “On the Radar” will be a river of quick-flowing updates, devoted to topics we find interesting or important, but where we aren't going to do additional reporting. We have zero interest in making small stories look big—or putting lipstick on a pig.

We’re very excited about this new presentation of our work, but anyone who dislikes the new three-column layout can return to the comforting world of reverse chronology with a single click (it’s in the upper right beside the word “Layout”). I earnestly believe that the three-column layout is by far the best, though, and I hope you'll give it a try.

Simplified, powerful, and personalized navigation

The feature I hope you’ll use most lives up in our new, persistent navigation bar. “My Stories” (beta) gives readers a dashboard that can be personalized. We’re launching My Stories as a beta feature because we are only beginning to scratch the surface of what we can do with it, and we want to hear more from you, too! At present, My Stories will use your authenticated state to personalize what it shows. Users who allow cookies will see updates since their last visit, along with recommended content, while users who log in will also see a reverse-chronological list of discussions they’ve participated in, sorted by update (it’s quite awesome). Better yet, My Stories is accessible from every content page, meaning it is easier than ever to hop from story to story.

Another major change pertains to our site sections. Now listed under “Main Menu,” we’ve expanded to include two new sections that highlight the work of two recent additions to our staff. Ministry of Innovation is the new home of business coverage on Ars, led by Senior Business Editor Cyrus Farivar. Risk Assessment, led by IT Security Editor Dan Goodin, will house white hat/black hat chronicles, hactivism, exploits, and all that good stuff. We also did a bit of housekeeping, renaming our science section from Nobel Intent (which apparently very few people “got”) to The Scientific Method. Our IT section has been renamed simply “The Technology Lab,” which reflects our conviction that IT is no longer the domain of niche companies and topics, but is now, in fact, a groundswell movement where the most interesting innovations almost always start in consumer spaces.

Mousing over "Main Menu" also shows you current Special Features and additional customization options, including our legendary “black site” option.

Promoted comments…

Another new feature I’m excited about is Promoted Comments. With our new design begins the process of improving reader participation. The first phase is Promoted Comments, which gives Ars editors and writers the ability to “promote” a reader comment from the comments section to the bottom of the actual story. We will now endeavor to promote the best one or two comments from reader discussions into the story, with an eye toward one goal: making you the most informed readers in tech. This means that we’ll promote the best comments, not necessarily the comments that agree with our reporting. It's our hope that this practice will help raise the signal-to-noise ratio in article discussions by celebrating the best comments.

…and Promoted work from the Web

Two special features present in the middle column deserve explanation. First up, we have "Ars Editors Picks," a list of our favorite stories from elsewhere on the Web. Ars 6.0 had something similar, but it was small and hard to read. With this new layout, we put it front and center, believing that our value to you is primarily in our ability to convey great content, even if we’re not the origin. When another site does something truly fantastic, we are going to put it here.

The second feature is a dynamically updated list of the week's top stories. These are the stories people are reading and talking about on Ars.

We have also created a special place for readers to leave constructive feedback and bug reports. We'll be opening it up when the site is fully functional, shortly. There's no point in reporting problems just yet, as we roll everything out over the next few hours.

Much more to come

In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be delving into some of the new features more—and introducing others. I’m also excited to say that we’re working on a feature story detailing the technical aspects of this move, which have been tremendous. On that account, a special word of thanks is due to Technical Director Jason Marlin and Lead Programmer Lee Aylward. Not only did we completely redesign the site, but we also migrated content management systems as well. A formidable feat, one these two did with aplomb.

Most important, I thank you for reading Ars Technica and for making possible so many incredible friendships, stories, and experiences. Our enterprise begins and ends with you. I hope you love Ars 7.0.

Update

Yesterday was the most trafficked Ars redesign launch ever, and as amazing and inspiring as that might be, we were overwhelmed. We knew it was going to be a battle; no amount of testing can truly simulate millions of readers doing their thing on this site.

We’re very sorry for the downtime and the difficulties experienced with logging into the site yesterday. We believe that we have both issues under control now, but we do ask for your patience as we continue to squash bugs and make improvements based on your comments.

Despite the site troubles yesterday, we did receive a tremendous amount of feedback, and we’re simply blown away by your passion for the site and our work. We welcome your constructive feedback and problem reports, as always.

In closing, I want to encourage the skeptics out there to try the default three-column view for the next few weeks. Our new design was born to handle the increase in content that comes from expanding our staff (and we’re still hiring), and a need to stop burying our best original work under minor stories that we feel obligated to cover. If you decide it’s just not for you, note that you can revert to a single reverse-chronological list (and change the site theme, too!).

Thank you for reading Ars Technica. Keep the constructive feedback coming, and please be patient as we work through bugs and other issues.