All About the Autostraddle 2.0 Re-Design

Autostraddle thinks you deserve better. In our ongoing campaign to save the world from unnecessary rainbow gradients, carefully organize our content, and talk to you as much as possible, we bring you Autostraddle 2.0: The Redesign.

Alex, our Senior Designer, and Tess, our Web Developer, have been working on this since March 9th, 2009, which coincidentally is also the day Jenny “died” (Jenny is Immortal!) and the day Autostraddle 1.0 launched. Riese told Alex it looked fine, and besides, its notebooky-template would immediately suggest that it’s a “draft.”

So we launched on March 9th … and ever since, Tess & Alex have been hard at work developing the website we all dreamed of when we were young children in the heartland reading YA Novels in the dark.

The redesign went up on September 20th and everyone’s life has gotten a lot better since then, hasn’t it?

So though this “things to know about the redesign” is a bit late, we’re better late than never!

A Tour of the Redesign Right Now

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I. The Regulars

Our “regular” columns are on a sidebar on the homepage [below] and also on the sidebar of their respective subpages. Regulars include Interviews, Carlytron’s Televisionary, the Autostraddle Roundtables, Music is Our Hot Hot Fix, and more.

Regulars

Coming Soon: Autofocus is going to be even better than before, like a real photoblog! But in the meantime, you can still find all the posts featuring Robin’s photography here: Autofocus.

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II. The Subpages.

Subpages Coming Soon: Events & Video!

On our topical subpages, which you can always access by the Autostraddle header, the latest stuff is always front and center with the most recent articles by date directly below the featured article.

Scroll down to see more articles, divided by category and listed chronologically.

IIa. Arts & Entertainment Subpage

Topics: Television, Music, Film & Theatre, Books, Fashion & Style, Photoblog.

Regulars: Televisionary, Music is Our Hot Hot Fix, Autofocus

Arts & Ent sub

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IIb. News & Features Subpage:

Topics: News & FeaturesBusiness & Technology

Regulars: Autostraddle Roundtable

Coming Soon: Riese’s Pieces

News & Feat sub

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IIc. Life Subpage

Topics: DIY Culture, Herstory, Travel, Personal Essays, Health and Advice

Regulars: DIY Culture, Lily’s College Lesbianage, Girl-on-World

Coming Soon: Sex & Relationships

Life Subpage

If you’d like to see older posts, scroll down the subpage and it’s all there by category. If you’re into time travel and wanna go waaay back, just click any category for its entire feed.

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III. More Daily Fixes!

We want to have more directed conversations, and to make information easier to navigate. Depending on which “stories we want to tell” that day, we’ll be posting Daily Fixes in 2-3 of the following categories: News & Politics, Society & Culture, Arts & Entertainment.  Really the whole idea of Autostraddle is to make everyone talk to us b/c we didn’t get enough love as children and were unpopular in high school.

Three daily fixes

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IV. Team Picks & Autostraddler of the Day in New Location

Team Picks are now in the right sidebar on the Daily Fix page. The Autostraddler of the Day is directly below that.

Autostraddler of the Day

Also, you can choose to subscribe to our RSS feeds without including Team Picks.Team Picks

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V. Alex’s Favorite New Feature – Last Ten Comments!

Also check this out, in the left column of the homepage — it’s Alex’s favorite new feature!

Last 10 Comments

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VI. Archives Made Easy!

If you’d like to time-travel to the past, there’s many ways to do it. Our archives are organized by topic or by month:

archives by topic

Feeds of the Daily Fix categories are available at the top of the Daily Fix page:
topic links

And you can always click “Read More” to see older article:
read more links

Also if you’re looking for our amazing girl galleries of hot chicks, an easy-to-navigate archive of L Word recaps or more info about the team, that’s on the front page:

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A few more FYIs:

We’re Not Done.
In addition to setting up the pages for archives, videos, galleries and events, there are still a lot of kinks being worked out. E.g., sometimes comments disappear and then reappear after a refresh Thank you for your patience!

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Read Autostraddle like a magazine [with a blog called “Daily Fix”!] not like a blog.
Check out the pages divided by topic areas (life, arts & entertainment, news & features), and go there to find new content not featured as a headliner, like TV recaps!

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I want an avatar!
That’s easy. Go to gravatar.com and load one using your email. It will show up on a lot of other sites you visit and comment on as well.

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How do I know what happened today on Autostraddle now that it’s not at the top of the daily fix?

Everything new and fresh will show up right on the homepage — organized by DATE! (how revolutionary) right there in the middle — and front & center on subtopic pages. If you want to navigate back, click “read more.”

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A few words on Autostraddle:

In December of 2006, Riese was blogging at This Girl Called Automatic Win and started a blog at theroadbeststraddled.blogspot.com, named after the working title of a book she was writing at the time about bisexuality. This side-blog was intended to be home to L Word recaps and other sexuality related discussions.

Below, from the Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence;
two roads diverged in a wood and I —
I took the one less traveled road best straddled
And that has made all the difference

Because her personal blog was called ‘Autowin,’ we began referring to “the road best straddled” as “Autostraddle.”

But we like the idea of having one foot on both directions; of hopping on something and taking a ride (sexually or literally), of having one foot on each side of the Terrible/AWESOME divide. The concept of straddling has grown on us though. It’s a beautiful idea, really: declarative, full of intent, confident, prepared. Whether it’s seductive or ambitious or athletic … it’s both open and full. It’s Autostraddle!

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Any questions? Ask away!

Keep in touch:

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Alex

Cofounder and Design Director of Autostraddle. Professional web/graphic designer. Whiskey enthusiast. Drumming hobbyist. A past speaker at the 2010 BlogHer Conference ("Good Blog Design: The Role of Layout in an Online Medium"), 2013 Salon LGBTQ Conference ("Innovative Best Practices for Brand-Blogger Campaigns") and featured in the Los Angeles Edition of Refinery29's 30 Under 30 in 2013. Co-owns and manages Tully's Training, a dog training company in Los Angeles. Twitter: @a_ex Instagram: alexxxvegaaa

Alex has written 100 articles for us.

14 Comments

  1. Alex’s favorite new feature is also my favorite new feature!

    Also, I love Autostraddle & all the people who work on it more & more with each visit. Good job!

  2. Read Autostraddle like a magazine [with a blog called “Daily Fix”!] not like a blog.

    I found that a wildly intriguing concept. Well played, ladies.

  3. I concur with Alex’s favoritism of the “Last Ten Comments” feature. It’s probably super weird and stalker-ish, but I find myself refreshing the home page quite often… just to make sure I read all the comments on a given page.
    —-
    P.S. I think you ladies are pretty rad. (just in case you haven’t noticed from my over commentage everywhere)

  4. “The redesign went up on September 20th and everyone’s life has gotten a lot better since then, hasn’t it?”
    yes

  5. Thanks for the feedback you guys! I’m so glad y’all are liking new stuff we put on here… obvs negative criticisms are welcome too! Where are all the negative nancy’s at? I want someone to yell at me!
    .
    JK no I don’t. I like Foist’s question… and would like Riese to answer it.
    .
    That is all – Thanks again for vocalizing such awesomeness everyone.

    • Why would you want someone to yell at you? That so *#$!@*% stupid! What the hell happened to you in your childhood that would make you want someone to effing yell at you you WEIRDO!!! (there how was that?)

      P.S. I love autostraddle like a kid who is not allowed to have sugar/dairy/meat/processed foods would love sugar/dairy/meat/processed foods. YUM!

  6. I think the most reasonable thing would be to ask for help. There are now professional services that produce a chic template at an affordable price for presentations. I am trying to do that myself, because we are given such projects at the university all the time and there is no need for decent and high-quality services on these topics. I hope it will be beneficial if you get to know those experts here at http:/slidepeak.com . They helped me a lot with the design of great presentations that are not stylish to view on a business platform, not just in the audience of the university. A degree like that is exactly what it takes to be the highest.

Comments are closed.