Why DU3's home page was a better design for a Democratic community than DU4's. The news and our responses.

[highplainsdem]

45. Needing those extra clicks to navigate is frustrating. I could

adapt to it more easily, though, if it seemed that other changes are working for all those using smartphones to access DU, instead of just working for some of them, while often creating problems for those using PCs.

Thanks for suggesting bookmarking, but I've had DU at the top of my bookmarks for years and always go straight to the home page.

Btw - and I know this was only an autocorrect mishap - I can't help wondering what you'd typed that was autocorrected to vinyl:

You could probably go there, vinyl
Bookmark it, then use your bookmark to access DU..

You also wrote:

Most of what you want is still there.

I wish that were the case, but what's there now is a shadow of the home page we're used to. Seeing the latest 25 LBN posts, with the most recent at the top, was a great plus. Now there are only 10, buried well down the page, often showing as only headlines without sources or snippets. The Left Column posts that have been made the focus of the page do include some, often quite a few, from LBN, but they're usually news old enough that most people will already have seen it, and the headline or thread-title font is enormous, especially for the one at the top. They can't replace LBN to catch Democrats' attention, no matter how much space is given to unnecessarily large headers. I have no idea what criteria are used to decide what goes in The Left Column, but reaching DU's home page and first seeing huge headlines/titles for news or analysis posted the day before or earlier - and published days before that (one post there this morning is about analysis published Tuesday - just can't begin to substitute for the 25 most recent LBN posts of news catching DUers' attention.

And not having that column of recent videos mixing news, commentary and humor is a huge loss.

At the moment, logged in and not seeing any ads, I can still see the 4 most recent videos scattered down the right column, mixed in with Trending/Greatest and the latest posts in various issue, culture, etc. forums, and FINALLY 10 (only 10) LBN headlines.

But I found out looking around DU for a while this morning that not even those 4 videos appear on the home page for those who aren't Star members and logged in. They're ALL replaced by ads. Possibly there were some ads in that DU3 column of videos, but there would still have been a lot of interesting videos there.

I don't think that a home page featuring older news and analysis/commentary most people checking DU would have already seen is the best look for the site.