Hello, Again: Welcome to the New Thurrott.com

I’m happy to announce the first major changes to the Thurrott.com web site, which is running on dramatically faster hardware and now features a lightweight, fully responsive new user experience.

As you may recall, I stepped into the unknown back in January and launched Thurrott.com in partnership with Blue Whale Web. And as you might expect, I’ve spent a lot of time since then just getting the content pumped out and establishing the site as the go-to destination for Microsoft’s most impassioned users.

But all along, we’ve been planning to expand and improve. We took the first step in August in hiring Brad Sams as our Executive Editor. It’s been great fun working with Brad and formalizing a relationship that dates back several years. We’re the guys who make the Dark Side fun.

The next step, of course, is this site refresh. Brad worked closely with Blue Whale Web Director of Technology & Business Operations Tim Speciale and Jacob Bearce, a front-end designer who has been instrumental in helping us clean up the layout. And the results are quite wonderful.

Here’s what you can expect from this refresh.

Better performance. Thanks to some new hardware, Thurrott.com is about ten times faster than it was before. As you might imagine given how much I interact with the site, this is immediately noticeable, and has improved my ability to get things done quickly. For the reader, it’s a huge win: Everything is faster.

Completely rewritten theme. The new layout is a complete re-write of the old theme. It’s now more lightweight and fully responsive, and most obviously has a nicely improved user experience, with the site moving from an unwieldy three-column design to cleaner two-column design.

Easier to make future changes. Thanks to these improvements, we now have a better foundation for adding new features going forward as well. As I discussed earlier, we have some additional changes in mind, and we will be will able to roll them out more quickly than would have been possible on the old design.

So let us know what you think. And thanks for reading.

–Paul