Here Comes the Thurrott.com Redesign

I am excited to announce that Thurrott.com will undergo a long-awaited, top-to-bottom redesign that will be completed before the end of 2022.

If you’ve been following along with our efforts to revamp the site, you know we’ve made a lot of progress over the past several months in overcoming past instability issues and adding some new features. The biggest and most visible, of course, is our new comments system, which now features notifications and automated moderation capabilities. And we’ve made other under-the-hood changes, like moving to the latest versions of WordPress and WooCommerce, and to a new hosting provider.

We were originally going to rebuild the entire backend of the site before turning to the user interface. But in working on the infrastructure for new features like an updated Forums experience and dark mode, we realized that it made more sense to do a comprehensive refresh. And once we started work on the new design, we got excited about how this would turn out.

On the backend, the Thurrott.com refresh will feature better-still performance and stability, and this new backend will provide us with a better foundation to build on as we continue to add new features. But the initial version will include lots of improvements, too, with a more modern look and feel inspired by Windows 11 that features improved accessibility and mobile support, and an optional dark mode. The forums are being rebuilt, and we are adding “read later” and “favorites” functionality.

On the user account front, we are completely revamping the member profile and administration functionality of the site. And while we’ve made some band-aid-type fixes for non-Premium members who wish to use their three tokens each month to read Premium posts, that will finally work correctly as well.

We hope to do more—we have some interesting ideas for RSS, for example—but I don’t want to overpromise. But we will engage with a handful of Premium and non-Premium members to make sure that this new design is the right direction for everyone.

Thanks for your patience. But the Thurrott.com that we’ve all wanted is coming soon. And I couldn’t be more excited.

–Paul