At the start of this year we changed our site a bit, with the new entrance (the portal) as most eye-catching result. Overall we got positive reactions, thanks for those, but we'd like to hear the negative ones too. Often those comments are helpful to improve our services.
Our intention is not to change for changing, like someone suggested. We are in a continuous process of critical judgement of our site, picking up comments we get every once in a while regarding the design. We certainly do not look critically towards other sites only, but also to our own. Especially those points that show up often in our reviews has to be (near) perfect on our own site.
Studying the log-files of our server we found out that a tremendous amount of people is actually still looking into our old, if not ancient, issues. Sometimes we even wondered how visitors were able to reach certain pages. Of course that's a bad point, because we always look critically to the possibilities to reach content on other sites. Therefore we gave the "Archive"- and "Search"-options a more noticeable place in our design. The small portal, contrary to the often relatively huge news page that was loading at first, gives a good opportunity to look something up quickly. Of course not only the archives and other less active sections can be overseen easily, but also the latest updates. On the portal we'll also mention if new magazines were added to that section, new reviews, new events and so on.
Having said this, we want to ask you a favour. In a few weeks we'll put another survey on-line, but this time regarding our own work. So if you can look at what you do and how you do it critically on your next visits, you might be able to give us usable comments in that poll. Not because we want to redesign again, but because we'd like to know how you experience the different options on our site. Hopefully we can improve our services further by implementing your suggestions in the future.