Tales of a Designer

A Big 9rules Redesign

For the past few weeks I was one of the lucky few to be able to see the advancements of the planned redesign for the 9rules site. Now that it’s finally gone live, it looks even better. With the amount of information going throughout that site, it is important to keep it well structured, and clutter-free. Exploring the site more and more, two goals jump out at me…

The first of those goals, being to push out content. Obviously 9rules is a blog community, so they want to push out the members’ content as much as possible. A couple of new features that were added to the site make this [content push] a whole lot better. The Live feature displays the latest 40 entries from the members. There are also tabs that let you display the latest “40-80″ or “80-120.” Again, pushing out more content.

Another great way of pushing out content for the members, is now each member has their individual profile. So you can now see their latest updates, get a screenshot of their site, and so forth.

Now, the second goal that I noticed with exploring the new site, is making it more of a community site, where people would want to stick around for awhile. This is where the revamped Notes and my.9rules. I don’t need to touch on the Notes, because it is nothing new, just a very nice redesign of the section. What I would like to mention is the new my.9rules section.

Now, being that a community has formed around 9rules, both members and non-members, it makes complete sense to make something for everybody. With my.9rules, you can set up your own profile and gather up a friends list, etc. Your profile will pull in the feeds from Flickr, Del.icio.us, as well as site feeds from your top 9 friends, and more. This eliminates have to upload pictures and such to yet another site, and lets the site(s) do the work for you. Now before you start thinking that it’s just another social network site, hold on.

A conversation was brought up in the Notes recently about social networks. Mike Rundle brought up a very good point, that what social networks are lacking is more interaction between people you know, aside from the normal comments, wall writings, etc. This new feature no 9rules solves that problem with my.9rules being tied pretty close with the Notes, where you can actually interact with people on various interesting topics.

I can’t help but to think that [owners of] social networks will raise their eyebrows and wonder why they didn’t do this first. It’s such a great feature, and I already spend tons of time on Notes. The cool thing still, is that it doesn’t make the 9rules site a social network site, and when first arriving to the page, you don’t get that sense at all, rather, it’s just a feature of the site to keep you coming back, even if you already have every feed from every member. It does seem like they slipped a toe in the door towards the social networking arena.

Overall, great job with the new stuff, even better job with the redesign. I can’t think of a better situation for a need to make a wider layout either. It looks great, and gives the content plenty of breathing room. I will stop there, and let 9rules team do the big explaining. A thanks goes out to them (Mike, Tyme, and Scrivs) for letting me be one of the earlier users before the site was public. And a kudos goes out to the team for doing such a good job. So, go play on the new site!