I founded Lifehack.org in May, 2005, as a place to share the little tips and tricks, or “hacks” — that I and others had discovered to make their work flow a little more smoothly, a little more quickly, and little higher quality.
By 2007, Lifehack.org had grown far beyond my original vision with just sharing what I learned. I began expanding the scope of the site by adding new contributors. Lifehack.org is now a Technorati Top 100 blog with over 60,000 subscribers.
After honing my vision of personal productivity at Lifehack.org, I shifted to the next piece of the productivity puzzle. I believe content in Lifehack.org is great to show you how to be more productive, but providing the actual tools and solutions is the way to enable you to be more productive. With that vision, in September 2007, I founded the startup Stepcase Limited.
Lifehack.org, now we call it Stepcase Lifehack, folds into Stepcase’s flagship brand, continuing to provide tens of thousands of daily readers with the best productivity, organization, and personal development content available, on the Web or off.
Along with the rebranding of Stepcase Lifehack, we have released a new site design. The new design captures many feedback and comments from our readers. We have restructured the frontpage to highlight our featured articles. We removed the excessive archives on the sidebar and replaced with a better archive view. We have also redesigned our layout with the goal of giving more exposures to our writers. The individual post page is cleaner as well.
What a huge difference compared to the old design:
As this is new, there may be little hiccups here and there. Feedback are welcome. Please also participate the poll and let us know what you think! As always, comment here or contact us when you encounter any problems on the site.
[poll=1]
Enjoy the new site, and to the next level of productivity!
Thank you for providing such great content, it’s why I read lifehack.org instead of some of the other ‘productivity’ blogs out there.
As long as the content stays so useful as it has always been, I don’t care about the site’s name. Thus, now I can finally differenciate between another feed I have, from Lifehacker.com. :)
I love the new design!
Curiously though, I see the second most popular option in the poll is currently Bad. I don’t understand why people would choose that, as for all intents and purposes, the site is much improved.
The new design is too cluttered. You need more air and wider margins between things.
I’m with Andreas, this new design just plain hurts my eyes. Way too cluttered!
Ben O. – I think the reason that most initially vote ‘bad’ is because of our gut reaction to label most things that are new or different as ‘bad’. (Don’t change!, they scream.) If you kept everything the same and asked again in a couple weeks, many of those responses would ‘spread out’ into other answers.
I like the new Writer’s Bio section. I feel more connected with the author seeing the face behind the article. Thanks.
It’s too cluttered and claustrophobic. It feels like an attempt to accomplish too much.
Thanks for the feedback, guys. We will add spacing to create some more rooms between sections. Compared to the old design, the new screen real estate has at least 20% of extra space to use.
@Deb: Statistically, we have removed many items from the old design.. so it has been trimmed :)
First thing I noticed when I landed on the new homepage? Big ad offering me copper kitchen cookware, then smaller ads offering to help me lose belly fat and hear from the Jesus army. Really turned me off the new design – love the content (been tuning in every day for last couple of years – thanks Leon & co.) and understand the need for ads but they distract from the user experience when you shove them right in my face! Can be improved….and look forward to seeing how things evolve.
I love this site but the redesign is just too cluttered. Way too busy for a user, even a past user, to understand where to go or what to look at. I’m honestly less inclined to visit here because it’s just too much.
And also – google ads right in your face under the main articles on the homepage. Way to cater to the user.
As a web designer myself, I actually prefer the old design over this one. Usability is key in redesigning a site and this new design is way too cluttered. The old design was simple and easier to navigate. I think this site has very useful information and a bad design can turn away a lot of visitors.
Hey guys.
As usual, your content is fantastic, however I feel that the design is a quite “noisy” overall, and the ad placement is less than ideal – especially the text ads right above the fold. I think you’re on the money, Leon, when you said you were working on adding more whitespace between sections.
I know you have to keep your advertisers happy, but I think the best thing you could do for this layout is to keep intrusive ads outside of the main content column.
On the plus side, I like the new logo, and the new navigation tabs are nice and intuitive (although it was a little disconcerting at first to see two rows), and putting the authors in the spotlight is a definite plus.
Always remember, though, that the primary goal of any design is to honour the content, (unless you’re David Carson).
The new archives section looks much, much cleaner. Overall, it’s much easier on the eyes. Who is the designer?
I can’t figure out what Stepcase does, they just seem to be a hyped up website, no visible products, samples. screenshots etc.
There is a difference between dreeming and impementation. Implementous interruptus.
@Doug: I don’t quite understand what do you mean by hyped up — we are developing our app right now and it is in private beta. So it is not the time to release any details yet. Our approach is very similar to what many startups would do: Put a product into private beta only until it is mature enough.
Plus Stepcase Lifehack is one of the company’s products. The new design and content are the direct result of our efforts. Don’t worry Doug — we are definitely not dreaming, but implementing.
Doug: I’ve played with some of the products, and you might start seeing some in action on the site (though you might never know!) in the next few weeks. There’s definitely something there, but like Leon says, the developers want to make sure they have a stable product before they start hyping it.
Of course, you’d expect me to say that, since I’m a Lifehack guy, but it’s still true!
By the way, did anyone notice what happens when you click a category on the second navigation bar (the one below the featured posts on the homepage). The first time I triesd it, it blew my mind! Then again, I like shiny things…
I LOVED the old design — it was simple, clean and refreshing — since I read nearly every day, it was easy to just jump to the page and read the latest articles. My immediate response to the change was confusion. I agree with others that its a bit too cluttered/messy. I’ll keep checking back, but it does make me less likely to visit — all I want to do is go to the page and immediately begin reading an article without being distracted by a lot of other content and ads.
@Milk: Where is it confusing? Do you mean the frontpage? Does the featured articles section give you an quick overview on what you want to read? Or do you prefer to have all the articles presented to you in descending date order? Do you to use frontpage or rss feed to begin your read?
@Leon – Yes having a list of posts descending by date was definitely better than having a feature articles section. It feels repetitive as those posts are essentially on the homepage twice…as lifehack users/lovers, we appreciated the content and having it in a more organized manner. FA section kind of adds to the clutter. (not to mention the google ads right below em.
Shlaom Leon,
Lifehack is one of my favorite blogs. Please don’t make it so difficult for me to read with this design change. It’s way to cluttered and distracting.
I makes my eyes hurt.
B’shalom,
Jeff Hess
[...] Stepcase Lifehack – Rebranding with New Design Posted in [...]
Well to say frankly, the site looks nice than before. Loads much faster than before and the navigation, visualization everythin is clear and content.in short like a web 2.0 sytle. Thanks for tuning up u r site.