ZDNet - are you TRYING to lose readers? (Your latest redesign makes me wonder)

Even though I, too, am a Web developer involved in redesigns, whenever one of my favorite sites totally changes things, I'm never happy.

That's because the redesign isn't for the loyal, regular reader. It's for the people who are NOT going to the site and sticking around. That's why I hated the last ZDNet redesign way back in 2008.

I couldn't find what I was looking for. The commenting system was (and is) painful.

But I got used to it. I never got over the layoff of George Ou.

And ZDNet still doesn't have a single writer I can name who's equally passionate, knowledgeable and skeptical about free software, especially Linux and BSD. ("Passionate, knowledgeable, skeptical" - a hard combination, I know ... but there are literally hundreds if not thousands of us out there blogging from just this confluence of perspectives.) And no Dana Blankenhorn doesn't count, even though I do enjoy his work.

Even so, I like ZDNet.

Tonight, http://news.zdnet didn't resolve to anything for awhile. Then it led to http://www.zdnet.com/news.

If you can't easily find the bloggers you want to read, what's the point? Just like in the 2008 redesign, about which I wasn't crazy (but got used to), you can click the "by blog" tab under ZDNet Blogs under the "main" teaser and have blogs and their recent entries ... except that in this "improved" version, those blog listings fill only a third of the screen.

That makes more room for aggregation. (if it's worth linking, why not just blog it?) Ads. Links to stuff I really don't care about.

Brilliant.

Anyhow, it's the content — the blog content — at ZDNet that keeps me coming back despite ill-advised redesigns, each worse than the last. (Note: most links to past news.zdnet.com stories are not working at present; presumably the redirects will be fixed at some point.)

Last time posted about ZDNet shooting itself in the virtual foot, I believe that somebody from the site came to its defense. I'd love for that to happen again, or for everybody's favorite Linux-hating, Microsoft commenter Loverock Davidson to come over and tell me I'm a fucking idiot.

In Loverock's honor (and that of the defunct URL http://news.zdnet.com), I will now recompile absolutely every package in my Ubuntu Lucid system just because I can.

Morale/story: Before you redesign, think — will you gain more than you lose?