New Design for CenterNetworks

I am very excited to announce that CenterNetworks has a new look and a completely overhauled backend setup. We've been testing the new setup over the past week and so far it's been solid. The goal was to simplify the frontend and create better content paths. With so much of our traffic going directly to an interior page, we worked hard to make sure that users would be able to see a top-line of what's new across the site.

The left menu now features content categories and companies of interest. This list will rotate as topics and companies move up and down the hot list. Our awesome sponsors are now highlighted and NYC now has it's own section. We provide more NYC Web coverage than any other site and we wanted to highlight the growing NYC Web scene. We've also added a list of contributors to the site. Some of our best posts come from our contributors and I felt this was very important to showcase. There's a lot more, poke around and find all the goodies.

The new design was created by Mark Langeneck of CMPLT design. Mark is one of the most talented designers I know. He understands more about usability, architecture and the general Web than most of the other 200+ designers I've worked with in my career. His questioning of design strategy also strengthens the final product. Perhaps it comes from his love of Elvis. Whatever it is, he did an awesome job.

In case you are wondering about the backend of CenterNetworks, we use Drupal and mySQL. I spent many hours optimizing the heck out of the code to make sure the site loads as quickly as possible. In my testing, the new CN loads 5x quicker than the old CN.

This is just the start; we've got more exciting things in the hopper. Thanks as always for reading and engaging with CenterNetworks and thanks to all of our great sponsors (current and past) who help us continue our operations. If you are on the feed, this is a great time to stop by the full site. And please let me know if you find any bugs or have suggestions for improvement.