Things look a little different around our blog today–it’s been a long time coming since it’s been a spare-time project. And so, today, we’re thrilled to bring you the new and improved Cleartrip Blog.
Just for the record here’s what our old blog looked like:
So what’s new?
- Better design and typography – The minimalist new design aims to create an improved visual hierarchy, with the typography tuned to perfect measures for a pleasurable reading experience.
- More social media integration – We’ve made it much easier for you to share the blog posts that you like (or dislike) with your friends on Twitter and Facebook by leveraging the tools made available by those two networks for publishers.
- Fully optimised for handhelds – We now have a single responsive design for the blog that gracefully scales up or down to ensure you get a comfortable reading experience whether you’re using a desktop, smartphone or tablet.
- Powered by WordPress – Until today, we’ve been using Squarespace as our hosted blogging platform; Squarespace is a fantastic product, but we decided it was time for us to move to WordPress as it gives us more fine-grained control over everything, allowing for any customisations we want at any time. We’re also migrating to WordPress as our CMS at Cleartrip, but that’s a story for another day.
We’ve had a lot of fun while redesigning our blog and we hope you love the new design and we hope you’ll keep reading.
Like most of the redesigned page, but the Small World search box smack in the middle of the top bar is kinda jarring. Visually, I’m used to looking for search on the right.
Ahhh!! I love clean design with lots of white space. I do agree that search box in middle is kind of looking misplaced. Overall a perfect thumbs up design.
Simple clean design. Kudos. +1 for the switch to WP and making it look like a tumblr.
Thanks everyone for the feedback — the search box for the blog is actually on the right, maybe it’s not as prominent as it could be. We’ll see what we can do to improve this.
Why can’t I comment after I finish reading the post? Why do I have to scroll to the top of the post again?
Zishaan–not sure what you mean? The post-a-comment form is available below the comments, so why would you have to scroll all the way up?
Hrush, I guess Zishaan is referring to the main blog page. We don’t have a ‘post a comment’ link at the end of each blog post.
Also, is the commenting disabled on old posts? I am not able to comment on http://blog.cleartrip.com/2011/07/04/cleartrip-turns-5/
Zishaan, we’ve been getting excessive spam through the comments and therefore disabled the comments for older posts. We’re working on a solution and as soon as we get that in place we’ll open up the comments. BTW, I’ve opened up comments for that Cleartrip Anniversary post.
screenshot:
https://plus.google.com/photos/101024612225273661916/albums/5629150287655312977/5629150287563977618?hl=en-GB
the various elements in the header are marked by a black dot (easier than drawing a tick-mark)
There are five elements in the header of the blog
1) the apple-ish header with product links and search bar
2) cleatrip logo image
3) blog title
4) author
5) comments
All of them are too close together, without much separation
between them. I think the title, author and date must have precedence.
also,
1) why is the “direction” of the voice bubble for comments pointing towards the author? has he commented on the blog? i would expect the bubble to be the left of the title
2) there are two search boxes. one on the header to search smallworld and one to search the site.
3) can we have a preview feature for the comments. do u support markdown?
from the old design i liked how the twitter feed was marked separately and the clean header design.
PS: i can move the image to a site of your choice or if you want you can host it
Thanks. for a informative blog.
Thanks Deepak,
All valid points. We’ll definitely get to them in our next release.
Regarding the preview feature – almost all the widgets on WordPress are based on jQuery which we’ve intentionally tried to avoid. Especially now that most of the content is also consumed on mobile devices, why load up large JS libraries unnecessarily?
surely loading jquery is a one time cost? you can also serve it using google’s cdn to amortize delivery costs and offload hosting charges. Also, set the expiry to 10 years or some such.
but it is your call and you know best