Hey all, you’ll notice that we’ve done a bit of work here on Arseblog News in terms of the design.
We have a new desktop look, and a new mobile look. It’s not fully completed yet, but we’re almost there.
As ever, if you notice anything that isn’t quite right, please let us know in the comments and we can take a look. There are a few things we are aware of, but do let us know anyway.
One of the main things we’ve done is hugely minimise the amount of advertising on the site to ensure a better experience for reading, commenting and scrolling through the site.
Neither home page, mobile or desktop, carries any ads at all now, and the ad placements on stories have been stripped back completely.
Obviously this does come at a bit of a cost to us, so if you were ever considering signing up to Patreon, your support would be very welcome. As well as supporting the site, you also get exclusive bonus content/podcasts including a Premier League preview every week, Discord chat, early release Arsecast on a Friday, and much more.
You can do so at patreon.com/arseblog.
Thanks folks.
Love the new design. Just FYI that I’m having trouble getting new articles from the Arseblog News RSS feed (no problems with the main site)
Not sure why, feed is valid (I just checked it!)
The RSS feed has recently stopped working for me too – Arseblog is fine but not news. I’m using Feedly.
Again, I don’t know why – feed seems fine to me and it checks out via feed validators.
Make sure you’re using the arseblog.news feed and not the news.arseblog.com feed.
Thanks Andrew. Will keep working to figure it out. I’m using Feedly like Scott above so maybe the problem is on their end.
Ruddy impressive! Well done all involved. Have you considered getting Rwanda to sponsor the site…?
Thanks for all you do, Dear Blogs. We appreciate you.
Thank you 🙂
I like the look overall.
One feature I did like of the old version is the ‘More’ buttons which allow you to see more articles of an overall subject area (eg ‘Matches and Team News’) straight away once you are looking at that area. I can’t see something like that now. Alternatively (or additionally) having the title of each area as a link that takes you to the full set of articles for that area would be good.
Thanks for the work, on the update and especially over time, an essential resource for Arsenal fans!
If you click on the various categories under the headline, it’ll do that, but will look into this.
Thanks. This was when I was looking on my laptop, it seems to be working differently on my phone.
Looks good! Fewer ads feels quite nice.
I can’t seem to find a link to the arseblog homepage, though.
A huge improvement – great work. Only small thing is that there doesn’t seem to be a link (back) to the blog from the news area?
Will sort that!
This is great. No complaints, considering the high quality content that you provide at no cost. Thank you.
I have two suggestions. A link on Arseblog news to Arseblog blog would be handy (it takes 2 whole seconds to type arseblog.com again). If there is one, I have not seen.
Old android app used to have dark mode, last big update to the app a few years ago somehow got rid of the already existing dark mode in the app.
Link is there now
Dark mode on the app in the works
Ooh fancy, well done looks great 👍🏻
Looks nice in general. Personally I mostly consume via mobile site. Normally I’d see the last post I’d not read and use the ‘next article’ button at the foot of the article to go to the next page, until I’d caught up. Occasionally I’d start from the most recently and go backwards… Either way I was confident I was absorbing every sweet morsel on the menu. It seems that feature has gone away and now there is ‘latest posts’, but that falls under the comments… Sometimes I don’t read all the comments (shhh! Of course I love and value everyone’s… Read more »
Ok – we’ll see if we can add a ‘next post’ button on mobile
Can the same be done for desktop? I would do the same thing as Petey here, but generally starting from most recent and going backwards until I hit what I already read. Separately, and this is probably beyond the scope of what you’re asking for here, I find myself not using the Arseblog app to read news stories because the comment section doesn’t exist there. This is particularly noticeable for post-game materials where, for example, it’s nice to bask in post-NLD glow with others 😉 Previously there was a link at the bottom of most articles to the web page… Read more »
Thanks, yeah this is what I do too – browse backwards til I’ve caught up with everything
Much obliged. Many thanks. Keep up the excellent work.
Agree, The site looks lovely but please can there be a link to the latest posts. Some of us need the chronological order to feel satisfied we haven’t missed anything!
At the bottom of each article there are links to next/previous post, and in the sidebar you can click a link to open all the latest posts.
Looks good. Now you need to work on Lana’s gameday diet.
Looks very nice so far. Very clean and nicely optimised on mobile.
To do something like this in the current age, when other football journalism sites are cramming their pages with so many ads as to make the content unreadable, is truly going above and beyond.
I have reservations about Patreon, but if you’re willing to do this for us, and that is your preferred method for generating donations, then I feel it is the least I can do.
We fear change.
WHY DO THINGS HAVE TO CHANGE?>>>>!
Just joking it’s nice
I noticed that the links from Facebook were missing their images
Yeah, saw that. Not sure why. Will check it out.
This should be fixed now
Looks good and no ads… have subscribed on Patreon.
One thing on the design: I’d like to see the top level comment text width slightly wider (closer to the article text width), at least on mobile. It’s fine as is but some of that margin could be taken up by content.
Looks nice, but I am missing the simple list of all articles (from all categories) in chronological order. The top section contains the most recent five, but not the earlier ones.
Yes, this is key. Just a place to click to see all the articles, most recent on top, like the old site had.
It’s there now in the sidebar
One thing on my tablet, if I hold it landscape the top two pictures have their tops cut off, can only see the bottom half.
Looks lovely, great work
Looks great. Doing the patreon thing already, and it’s good value. You can’t have too much Arseblog in your life!!
It would be good to get a function where you can see if someone has replied to a comment. I often post comments which turn out to be total shite, and it is helpful to quickly see when people have kindly pointed this out….
Great job. I was getting tired of the ads and was visiting the site less often, but now it’s back at the top of my list.
Cool.
Desktop article text is quite small. Either I’ll have to increase browser zoom, or if you can have a feature to increase/decrease text size and remember it then that would be great.
As if we needed more proof that you guys are phenomenal 😍
I love it. Cheers Arseblog! In this era of click baits and false news this site is always a breath of fresh air! Keep the winning streak going! 👊
Patreon member at last! Thanks for all the years of amazing content!
Snazzy new look! Thanks Andrew & team.
Bring back the puppy 🐕
I liked the previous and next article, that would appear at the bottom of each article, from the previous iteration. Seems to have gone from this new version.
Oh, you are right! Those buttons were crucial!
Congratulations on the face lift.
Feedback : – I really appreciated the links to previous story and next story at the bottom of every article.
It ensured that I did not miss anything if I moved in a sequential manner. If you could consider re introducing them that would be great.
PS
Kudos on getting rid of the ads. As someone who runs a newly started business I understand that forgoing revenue is very hard. Your own early experiences which you shared on the Podcast influenced a couple of my own decisions (on what not to do)
Similar to the “next” and “previous” article links, I did always like having the ability to sort by month to just have every article from every section in chronological order. But maybe I’m just a weirdo! (Okay, you can nix the “maybe” part.)
Other than that small feature, I think the new look is really great! And trust me, I almost always look at webpage redesigns and find them to be abhorrent, so this is genuine praise.
Wow nice work.. I was lost a bit thinking am I really on arseblog? Cool I loved it man. Keep it up and nice work. But will love it if you keep us posted with the news of our players out on loan weekly pls.
Lovely work! Wouldn’t mind if on mobile/small screens, you bumped up the size of the article text a touch and reduced the line height (there’s a lot of space between lines of text.
I’ve been reading so long that the new font is unsettling. I think this cursor should be red though, it’s a little Spursy.
Also, I should say it looks very good! Even on my iPhone SE which no one designs for and on which most of the internet looks like total shite. I’m a UI professional myself so cheers.
I was never too bothered about the amount of ads before. You’ve always made it clear how much you reduce these, and you were already so much better than other sites. However, if you are reducing then it would be good to drop that ad which appears above the story every time. That fills half the screen (iPhone8) and makes the ad seem more important than the story. Personally I’d happily have a couple of online ads rather than one right at the top. Just a thought!
I’m using the old version of app (1.9.0) as I use the Speak Article feature. However over the last week, the News section is not loading articles at all.
This is nice! Great work Andrew
If I’m being honest the site is much slower now. First paint, css and images taking longer to load. It’s not too bad per se but certainly a downgrade in performance from the old layout.