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Friend,
Have you noticed?
Over the last two weeks, Common Dreams rolled out a website redesign alongside crucial upgrades and improvements to the underlying platform the site is built upon.
Many readers have asked us: “Why? If it wasn’t broken, why fix it?”
Well, frankly, it was very broken. And it was time to fix it.
The two main problems?
First, we built our platform upon a content management system that will soon no longer be supported with security or programming updates. When that happens, new bugs and threats go unfixed, resulting in reader messages such as “Warning: This site is not safe.”
Second, until recent years news websites (like Common Dreams) were designed primarily to be viewed on desktop computers. Consequently, our site has been performing very poorly on mobile devices.
In 2007, when we began using this platform, 99 percent of our readers came to us via desktops, and mobile traffic was less than 1 percent. In 2014, when we last did a major site update, mobile readers had increased to 17%. Last month, 62% read Common Dreams on smartphones, 33% on desktops, and 5% on tablets.
Our former website had run its course, and our mission was suffering as a result.
Like a new restaurant “soft opening,” we’ve held off announcing that we were “open” to allow us to work out the bugs and kinks that were not seen until the new site went “live.” Some known tweaks and fixes remain, and our team will continue to work them out in the coming days.
We’re at the stage now where we want to ask you for your feedback.
What do you think? Please take our very brief survey:
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