Your Tour Of The New Lifehacker Australia

Yes, Lifehacker has a new look! We’re rolling out a new look across all the Allure sites this week. Here’s an overview of what has changed, and what will be coming in the near future.

We know that whenever there’s a design change on a familiar site people complain — heck, we’ve done that ourselves — but the aim is to make the site easier to read and navigate, not to radically change the way it works.

We’ve tested pretty hard, but inevitably stuff will get broken when there’s a change on this scale. Let us know if you see any random bugs and weirdness, either through the comments or by hitting the Contact tab on the right.

The obvious big new feature is the Top Stories block, which lets you easily slide through six stories representing the crème de la crème of our most-recent content. It’s effectively replacement for the old right-side Editor’s Picks box. We’re also using that top section to highlight Regular features such as Planhacker, Road Worrier and Ask Lifehacker for easy access. (In the near future, we’ll also have listings of the most commented and most popular posts.)

You’ll also notice that our seven key categories are now colour-coded, which makes navigation easier. We’ve made images larger, improved tags (for tag-based navigation), and made the content area about 10 per cent wider on both articles and the main listing of articles. Our comments feed now also supports Gravatars, so you can add your picture to comments.

Finally, page load times should be better thanks to faster image servers, streamlined code, plus slightly fewer ads and improvements with how they’re displayed.

One final quick point, before anyone asks or suggests it: no, this isn’t based on the redesign that happened on the US site earlier this year. We run entirely different code bases for our sites, so when it comes to design, it’s an all-local effort. Let us know what you think, and if you encounter any teething issues, in the comments.