If you’re reading this on enConnected.com this, we can comfortably say that I and the behind the scenes team made it through the upgrade of enConnected early this morning.
When we set out to revamp enConnected for the fourth time, we wanted to do something familiar yet be bold. Throughout three versions of enConnected we’d mostly done the same things for. Indexes, the way you find content — on the site hadn’t changed since launch. On the backend we were still hard-coding updates for articles and news indexes. On the front-end itself, things were often slow to load and responsive design had left the site with a few issues we just couldn’t kill off easily.
The new enConnected should seem both familiar and new. It’s intended to carry the legacy of past versions of enConnected. The green and white that we’ve used for years is still here. What’s changed is the amount of dead space on your screen. We’ve worked hard to build a new system that fills dead space and gives you more. We’ve tried to surface more different types of content on the homepage and sidebars when it is appropriate. Everything should feel cleaner and leaner.
Speaking of clean and lean, we’ve gone back to the drawing board on some of the features you may have loved. Videos, Podcasts and enConnected Social are down right now. Those three areas will make their return in a update once we’ve dealt with some early bugs — like the featured area on the home page. One thing that won’t be making a return is enConnected on Windows Phone. We’ve gone ahead and deprecated the system that handled it in the hopes that our time can be better spent here.
We’ve also trimmed down on the overwhelming ridiculous amount of news categories. Don’t panic, the stuff you care about should still be easy to find, but a lot of the older content that focused on Zune and Windows Phone has been merged into simple topics.
As always, send us any issues you find. Send us any features you miss. A up of coffee wouldn’t go amiss either.
enConnected Four is named “I’ll Always Love My Momma” in memory of my aunt Lisa Wilson Taylor. She died this past August from cancer at the age of 43. The song was first recorded by The Intruders decades ago. You can read more about the changes in our Change log.
