The Hardware Asylum Redesign v2.0
When I launched the Hardware Asylum several years ago I was doing much more than rebranding Ninjalane.com, I was upgrading a good portion of the Ninjalane CMS so I could split the older content from the new. As a result I didn’t spend much time on the UI aside from creating “Flame Guy” and creating a basic layout similar to the previous edition.
The intent was to launch the site and gauge market acceptance before spending too much time on making the design unique. Strangely enough, what started out promising quickly went downhill around the same time I stopped giving away custom painted computer cases.
Imagine that?!?
Against popular opinion I do have a vested interest in making Hardware Asylum work and with that I am proud to announce the launch of Hardware Asylum v2.0.
The new website design brings with it a radical departure from what other hardware review sites are doing and I think it will work out well. Traditionally my competitor sites have all taken the “blog” approach when it comes to site design and layout. We can thank the rise of Wordpress and Drupal for making that happen. Before that it was all three column designs thanks in part to PHP Nuke.
Have you noticed the pattern? Yep, the majority of website owners are not web programmers and grab some CMS off the shelf and then higher a reader or local development shop to build a tempate. Because of this most sites follow a 2/3 by 1/3 site layout with two layers of drill-down.
I on the other hand take things to the next level having designed and built my own multi relational CMS and applied that to a Responsive HTML5 site design that I also developed. Pretty much the polar opposite of using Wordpress and/or Drupal
Don’t get me wrong, there isn’t anything wrong with using an off the shelf product, in fact Ninjalane v2 through v4 borrowed heavly from Wordpress themes and followed a similar design pattern because it was popular and easy to maintain. Ninjalane v1 (which was awesome BTW) and Hardware Asylum v2.0 are both unique in that I did something different..
The new design is pretty straight forward and instead of doing a listing drill-down I have decided to take a “news article” approach where items on the page decrease in importance the further down the page you go. For instance at the top of the homepage you will find large chicklets showing the latest articles and reviews followed by an icon list of popular categories and the next four articles.
Below that is a dedicated section for the Hardware Asylum Podcast, which is also awesome, be sure to give it a listen.
At the bottom of the homepage is a small section dedicated to Hardware News. This section used to dominate the homepage and while I felt it was relevant at the time the truth is google cares very little about “news” and tech sites are very reluctant to share reviews from competing websites so why bother. Funny story, back in the day I stopped sending news to “certain” sites because of the liberties they took with my content and I suspect it was the start of the downward spiral. (read: steal most if it, re-write it slightly and post it as their own with a very small “source” link at the bottom. Not Cool)
But, I digress. The news section is simply a list of articles that links directly to the full story.
The secondary index pages (Reviews Articles Builds) remain about the same with the addition of a unique version of the carousel found on the homepage. The rest of the pages I felt worked well so I left them alone.
With that said I will be making a few tweaks to the design over the next several months to help pretty up some of the pages and adjust the content filtering. With any luck you may finally see similar reviews in the side bar instead of “tech news” that nobody cares about.
As always if you have any questions, concerns, praises or hate mail send them my way. My contact information can be found on this website and handful of social sites I try to keep updated. Take care and enjoy the website update.
