As you can see, we've got new digs. (And, momentarily, we're experiencing a second "Beta" stage as we transfer over the existing content.)
"But AltRight's original site was so cool," you're thinking, "why the change?" It's true that the site was quite beautiful; however, I felt that there were many factors that justified a change—or rather a simplification and concentration of the site's aesthetics and functionality.
First, as time went on, I failed to see any compelling justification for dividing up the site into multiple blogs (though I still think the names were great: "Malinvestments," "Zeitgeist," "Untimely Observations," etc.). Categorization can be handled with simple tagging.
Also, since I've stopped full-time daily blogging, and the site has settled into publishing longer pieces with less rapidity, there's no longer a pressing need for divvying things up.
When I first created AltRight, I thought of it something like an evil version of The Huffington Post ("evil" in the minds of our enemies, of course); it thus had a myriad of different sections. But as things turned out, readers don't really use the blogs. As revealed by analytics, they read the site chronologically, or else they read a single article that was sent them via Twitter or Facebook. Needless to say, we should have a site whose design reflects how people actually use it.
Secondly, I felt it necessary that AltRight get on board with two pronounced -- and related -- design trends (which hadn't yet taken effect when the site was first launched). The first of these trends is towards greater simplicity and elegance, and away from the crowded, link-laden, confusing "web portal" type design of the '90s and early 2000s. This simplified aesthetic is, in many ways, a consequence of the fact that people are reading web content on all sorts of different devices, and much less frequently on desktop computers. A site should no longer be optimized for a big a monitor or a 15" laptop; it should respond to tablets, smartphones, and everything in between; and it is the "post-PC" devices that, in fact, now account for most of the web traffic. The redesigned AltRight works equally well on a 4" smartphone screen as on a 27" desktop.
In conclusion, AltRight's new design is still inflected by a certain modernist Gothic, as was the original. But as I get older, I like things to be simpler.
I hope you do, too.
