Am I the only person who doesn’t love the new look of the website that seems to have come from nowhere? The landing page seems so cold end empty, there are vast expanses of white and grey, and whatever happened to the branding? The tiny Jancis Robinson signature logo sitting top left looks almost apologetic. I’d love to know what the thinking was behind this new look.
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Hi Louise, and thanks for the feedback – we love it even when it’s not positive. This is a work in progress and we’ll be improving it quickly over the next few days/weeks – including creating a better header!
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You’re not the only one. Utterly horrible redesign. Please scrap it. A new header isn’t going to make a damned bit of difference in this travesty.
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Not to pile on, and I’m aware that everybody is resistant to change, but I agree that the current iteration of the redesign seems to be moving away from the soul of the website. Headings like ‘Today’s MUST-READ’ feel more at home in a tabloid’s website than here.
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I think its great .
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I agree - it’s clean and sharp, and easily digestible. I was glad that they kept the quick access banner at the top, so that I can quickly naviage to the tasting notes.
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Thank you all for your feedback. It’s not perfect yet but we’re working on it – and for those of you who access the site on your phone, it’s much easier to read.
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I like it - clean and modern, and works nicely on the phone as Tara says.
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Indeed, on my phone it looks attractive (I never use the site via my phone, I should have thought of that, my bad). On my laptop screen, there’s a lot of empty space across the top third of the screen… but no doubt I’ll get used to it! 
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OK, I’ll admit that my outburst above was a knee-jerk reaction. When I first went to the page that day, my first impression was that someone had mis-coded something and “broken” it, causing the content to display incorrectly. It was only after a couple of minutes that I realized that, no, this is a new, intentional format. I went to the Forum to express my dismay, found that someone else beat me to it, and just piled on.
To be clear, I’m still not a fan. But let me be more specific. (And whether it renders better on a phone is not something that matters much to me, since I rarely access the site on my phone.)
I find the overall design decidedly unbalanced, and lacking in pleasing or attractive design aesthetics. Leading with one overwhelmingly large graphic with other links pushed to the side simply does not work for me as offering anything appealing or inviting to the eye.
Screaming at me with one bellowing “MUST READ,” while quite literally marginalizing all the other content (in placement, size, and stripped of any additional introduction), some of which might be of far more interest to me, is, simply … well, borders on offensive.
Scrolling down the page brings up another oversized, unbalanced image for “WINE OF THE WEEK.” Is this really the second most important content on the site? Frankly, as a member reading in the US, I pay attention to the weekly selection but it’s not something I spend any time or energy on. I know you try to select items that are widely available, not just in the UK, but that isn’t always the case — and the US is a big place, so just because it’s “available” in the US doesn’t necessarily mean it’s available in my section of the country. I would think that’s an even bigger concern in other countries. And in itself, that’s entirely understandable and not a problem or shortcoming of the feature — until the site tries to convince me that it’s the second most important piece of content you provide! My “wine of the week” is much more likely to come from the tasting notes contained in one of the (marginalized) articles. (And if it’s so important, why do I have to scroll down a screen to be presented with it?)
There are other annoyances (I always knew where to find the other content; cluttering the home page with it doesn’t make it any more accessible, though I understand the attraction of more actively drawing others toward it). But those are the primary reasons I so dislike the new look. But I have a work-around: I’ll just set my bookmark to the “Articles” page, and skip the “front” page altogether.
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White is the content about the graves ? I searched for it (more information about Bobal) and didn’t find anymore.
Graves = grapes
To be honest, I hadn’t realised that there was a new design! I now realise that it was because, like Bob, (inadvertently or not) I’d set my browser to go straight to articles. I shall leave it like that as personally I dislike the modern tendency of lots of white space. I understand that websites nowadays tend to be designed more with smartphones than PCs in mind, but as I read the site on a PC I prefer websites crammed with information and links so that I can get to where I want to go as fast as possible
I use the website mostly from my phone and find the new design much better on it!
One small request I would have. Whenever I open the mobile site, I get a banner on the top of the page with a “Claim your 5% discount” message. I need to click this banner away every single time to be able to use the navigation bar on the top of the page. Surely after clicking the X once, it should just stay hidden. Moreover, I think it should just not show in the first place for members who are logged in (since they have no use for a 5% subscription discount)
Thanks!!
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Daniel, you’re absolutely right that it shouldn’t show to logged-in users; that’s not supposed to happen! Thank you for letting us know; will endeavor to get that fixed asap.
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I also like this new format too!
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I really quite like the interface / visual redesign. It’s sharp, and it feels more sophisticated than the previous website. White space is good!
But I think Bob is onto something with the information design, because many of the labels don’t serve the reader in ways they may have used to in the previous design. For example, the “Must Read” label isn’t useful – because it isn’t informative. It’s just a featured story (or set of featured stories). Likewise, “Free for All” and “Tasting Articles” and “Inside Information” are not (ahem) informative for those of us who are subscribers.
Rather – and more importantly – the headlines themselves should tell us about the content, and I think the headlines could generally be more descriptive, and certainly more narrative. Even if I think that the writing on JR is at least as vivacious as that on Vinous Media, and sometimes more so, Vinous does a better job of creating narrative headlines, which both draw me into the article and shape the story that they then build out. On the JR site, for example, I’d like to know why I should care that there’s a competition between “Oxford v Cambridge at the tasting table” (an article I haven’t read because I don’t know why I would care). We are wine lovers, and you infuse your love of wine into your articles – it would make sense to infuse that love of wine and stories into your headlines as well.
I know you’re continuing to refine the website, it’s off to a good relaunch and I look forward to seeing additional improvements.
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Thanks so much for this really useful and constructive criticism. I really should get a Vinous membership to see what you mean, but have so little time for reading rather than writing. And reading about wine feels, I’m seriously ashamed to admit, more like work than reading a novel or a biography.
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And now, praise where praise is due: the new story about “Swiss wine, rewritten” and its sub-head “A new generation of Swiss winemakers is redefining their country’s Alpine viticulture” make me want to read the article. The questions immediately arise to me: how are these people redefining the viticulture? What are they doing, and why are they making these choices? I can’t help but want to read this article, nice work drawing me in. And Paula’s article is of course superb, and she addresses all the questions that came to me.
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I don’t mind the new layout - I rather like the clean font, and I agree the new layout works well on mobile devices. However, it feels an odd decision to roll out the font change in phases so the home page is refreshed but the articles are (currently) in a different font. I’m sure the deeper refresh is in the works, so I’ll reserve full judgement!
A couple of observations/suggestions for improvement however:
The huge space taken up by the ‘Just published’ article (as Bob has pointed out) takes away space to list the other recent articles, some of which have their headlines/titles truncated, which is very unfortunate. I come to JR.com every few days/every dozen or so new articles, and so I’d like to see more space allocated to these cards so I could readily see a more complete list of what there is to catch up on. The ‘just published’ hero slot might be good for visitors who come to the site every day, and I’m sure you have this data. Of course you could dynamically style the page according to when the user was last on the site and how much new content has been published since then - wouldn’t be all that hard technically.
I feel that the ‘wine of the week’ area has been given too much real estate - admittedly it’s below the fold but takes up as much space as the articles, which feels disproportionate.
Of course I come for the writing and advice, which remains excellent as ever, so these are minor quibbles!
Jason
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