I like cars and tech. Most of my time online is spent reading about those two interests, and for the past few years my first clicks have been to Jalopnik and Gizmodo, two of Gawker Media's many weblogs about all things wonderful in the world. That recently changed when Gawker reformatted their blogs, removed ease of use, broke iPad formatting, and dispersed their large community of commenters to the wind. Take a look at this chart from Alexa. Bet you can tell the moment Gizmodo went live with the new format:
Giz and Engadget both have weekly variation in pageviews but they track pretty closely. With the occasional scoop exception, they match up pretty well. While the most recent Engadget-only spike in mid-Feb may be a fluke like January's, I doubt it. It may also be that Gawker's new format has broken Alexa's ability to capture pageviews. Regardless, you can hardly visit a Gawker site's comments pages without seeing complaint after complaint. More after the jump.
I was willing to give them a shot, but then I visited Giz on my iPad and was treated to this horrible abomination:
The "Next Post" banner is static. Looks cool at the bottom of the iPad screen until you try to read anything. Then it's a mess. Here it is in Landscape view:
I emailed Jalopnik and Gizmodo with screenshots, complimented them on their willingness to try the new format, and hoped for a fix. Their fix? iPad users are now forced to the mobile site - a spare, terribly boring format for iPad viewing - and they've removed the link that let us revert back to the full site (although why would I want to now?).
I'm not a developer, but couldn't this have been handled by setting up a test site and inviting users to provide feedback? This wholesale switch might be a bit like pulling off a band-aid, but in this case I think they pulled off the whole limb with it.
So goodbye Gawker. The new format is a terrible fix to a problem that didn't exist, and you've forced it upon a large community that hates it. Autoblog and Engadget are getting my traffic now.