Welcome to the Newly Redesigned chinaSMACK!

After many weeks of hard work, welcome to the newly redesigned chinaSMACK.

chinaSMACK - 2008 September 25chinaSMACK - 2009 September 27chinaSMACK - Today

2008 September 25 … 2009 September 27 … 2010 April 27 TODAY

There are many big changes. Some of you may find the changes to be very drastic. However, I hope you will come to like them after some time and enjoy some of the many new features to help you discover new and interesting content. For example, see our new “At a Glance” page for Top 10 lists of our most popular content in 2008, 2009, and so far this year.

Please take your time to explore our new website. Since this is a new design, there may be some bugs. If you find one, please let us know so we can fix it.

If you have not yet subscribed to receive our latest posts, please subscribe to our RSS feed now. If you prefer receiving our latest updates in your email, you can subscribe to our RSS by email. You can also follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook. We plan to add additional unique content and updates to both our Facebook page and through our Twitter account in the future.

In addition to our new look, we have some new plans and developments to share with everyone soon. Of course, we will continue to translate the scandalous, silly, stupid, and serious stuff that becomes popular on the Chinese-language internet. Although we cannot make everyone happy, we hope to continue learning, sharing, and laughing with our loyal fans and all the people who truly understand what chinaSMACK is about.

At this time, chinaSMACK and I would also like to thank some very kind and generous people:

Python: If you have noticed that our website is faster and more reliable recently, it is because of Python‘s hard work improving, updating, and managing our web server. My job is to make more and more and more. His job is to beg me to do less and less and less. In the past, when I win, our web server loses. Now, we can both win. I think.

Kai: Many parts of the new chinaSMACK design were directly contributed by Kai. He helped us add a lot of new features and answered many questions very patiently. In fact, many parts of the website were programmed by him. For clarification, all of the pretty parts of our website were designed by me. All of the ugly parts were designed by him.

Chris & Freedur: chinaSMACK is happy and thankful for Freedur‘s continued support. In addition to their sponsorship of chinaSMACK, they have also provided us with VPN service which has allowed us to do many things we could not do because of China’s Great Firewall. If you need VPN service to allow you to access websites like Facebook or YouTube that are blocked in China, please give Freedur a try!

Of course, chinaSMACK owes its success mostly to you, our readers, our supporters, and our fans. Thank you so much for visiting, commenting, and sharing us with other people. We will continue to do our best to share more about modern Chinese society and popular Chinese internet culture with you. We hope you enjoy our new design!

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33 Comments

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  1. Congrats!! Looks good!

  2. Eh.. it is a bit overwhelming and I feel I lost the clear easy view whats going on.. I feel bombarded…
    OK, maybe it is a transition thing, get used to a new thing.

  3. This is truly great and innovative design!
    It is much more interactive and makes people stay longer on the site and explore it…

  4. Woot! Great redesign!

  5. Hooray! Ура! 万岁!

    This new theme rocks!

  6. This new design makes my laptop lag when I browse the site.

  7. It so…beautiful..

  8. I like it. Well done Fauna (& Kai)!

  9. Lookin’ good Fauna! Even the ugly parts Kai put in… ;)

  10. Nice work! Especially the ugly parts contributed by Kai! :)

  11. honestly, i liked the previous design better. this format is extremely dark and makes me feel like im in a haunted house.

  12. It’s different. But in my opinion it’s too dark. I love ChinaSMACK, and I’ll continue to read it, but only through Google Reader.

  13. The white content area on an otherwise black/dark themed site is a bit too contrasty for me. But love the highlight and feathered/gradient effects.

    What happened to being able to vote a comment up/down?

  14. It’s far too dark imo, even the pictures have been made darker. It’s like a few websites my gf showed to me that had been temporarily changed to mourn the Qinghai earthquake.

    I thought the previous theme was good although i like the background images here which gives the site a more relevant feel.

  15. I’d prefer that you spend more effort on the quality of the content instead of the site design. The content quality has really dropped over the past year.

    • Hi ShanghaiSteve,

      Please tell me the content that you like in the past.

      • I enjoy the articles that provide me with some insight into daily life in China. While all your articles are about Chinese life, some articles are more insightful than others. Here are some examples of articles that I found interesting:

        Brother Sharp
        Bad Chinese Tattoos
        Bus Fire in Chengdu
        Handicapped Beggar Sidewalk Art
        Government Official Attacks 11 Year Old Girl
        Nanjing Official Smoking Expensive Cigarettes
        2 Year Old Smokes and Curses
        Pedestrian Hit By Car in HangZhou

        Your site provides a great service to readers inside and outside of China. For example, the article about the official attacking the 11 year old girl resulted in the official being fired. While this article was available on many Chinese language sites, it was only available on a few English language sites. In my opinion, exposing misdeeds by government officials is more likely to result in changes when foreign media becomes aware of the issue. So please continue to provide similar articles. That said, readers outside of China really need more examples of fun and happy stories about life in China. Foreign media really has a myopic view of China and your site can help change that.

        Good job!

  16. Well done guys, very nice!

  17. This is more of a design suggestion, but maybe use Helvetica/Arial/TrebuchetMS instead of Verdana for the titles and comment counts. Verdana’s letters are very fat, only look good when small or treated very specially. Overall you are already using Helvetica/Arial and TrebuchetMS, so maybe lose Verdana and be more simple with your font choices, to match the awesome simple and elegant new design. I’m very impressed there are no rounded corners; great taste! Front page reminds me of new CNN site. Very good.

    • Hi p,

      Thank you for your suggestion! I am considering changing the title font for each post preview on the home and archive page from Verdana to Arial. Then I can make the box smaller. However, I am not sure about the comment count. Which comment count do you refer to? Most of the text is using Verdana (I research this a lot and people say it is more readable than Arial) but the titles or headings usually use Trebuchet MS. There is no Arial right now so only 2 fonts.

      • Fauna, you’re right. Turns out the body text is all in Verdana. This is perfectly fine, since the font is made for smaller text on screens. In terms of larger text using Verdana, this is a successful example:
        http://onlinecatalog.ikea-usa.com/2010/ikea_catalog/US/ Overall, I suggest you keep your body text consistent as Verdana.

        For the headings in Trebuchet, I suggest not using custom letter-spacing (not very precise) and to use bold. Probably better to keep the 2 levels of headings you have: main as Trebuchet, sub as Helvetica/Arial instead of Verdana; but make sure you put Helvetica before Arial, so people on have it (Mac users) will have the best possible experience.

        For the comment counts, I was referring to the post title at the top of this page. But I change my mind, big numbers actually look ok in Verdana. I also like the tag cloud at the very bottom of this page, but I think it’s a very custom section and an exception.

        I’ve written a page before that tests web fonts. It’s not very complete, but maybe can help you find some better font stacks: http://tinyurl.com/x-platform-font-tests

        I’m sure most of your audience use new browsers, so feel free to play with the new @font-face feature in CSS3 which lets you use any font as long as you have the file (found in places like http://www.josbuivenga.demon.nl/). You can also do tricks like text-shadow, which aren’t too cheesy at 1px.

        Last, a WP plugin you may be interested in is WP-Typography, since you are justifying the body text in the articles. This plugin will automatically hyphenate your lines, which makes the wordspacing more even, and may also help give you more space in the post previews.

        • Hi p,

          I have changed the post preview titles to Helvetica and Arial and adjusted the boxes. I have also installed the WP-Typography plugin but I am not so sure I am using it correctly. I worry it will slow the website but we use caching already. Thank you for your suggestions and advice!

  18. Looks great :)

    I love the darker motif

  19. Gooood! Really nice! I hope this will help you to sell more T-shirts ;-)

    Marco

  20. all the hover over effects are annoying…

    • Totally agree! Only because a effect is possible does not mean it must be used. Especially, it does not mean it must be used excessively.

      On a site I designed some 8 years ago I did the same mistake(s), many items with opacity:.8 and 1 on hover (onmouseover, no css 2 back then). And flipping of title and teaser on the homepage. Looks nice for 1 day, is annoying for the rest of the time.

      Sorry for the critics, I love chinasmack, but the new design has some flaws. Just simplify it a little and it should be fine.

  21. I like the new design, but since the change I’ve found that although the articles load quickly, the comments take a looong time to load.
    Anyone else having this issue? Or is it just me?

  22. Hi Matthew,

    I think there are different Google advertisements for visitors from different countries.

  23. It is different from each page. On this page, I see “china consumer trends”, China Buyers”, “Visa Service in Shanghai”, etc.

  24. Hi Matthew, I can see your gravatar. You look bored.

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