As you may have noticed, Slate’s home page looks a little different. We hope you like our new design, but the changes aren’t purely cosmetic. We’ve made these improvements with readers in mind, with an eye toward making it easier to find the stories that interest you and to minimize the time it takes for Slate’s pages to load.
The most obvious change is that you now have access to the previous week’s worth of Slate covers—including the large images that show up at the top of our home page and link to our big stories of the day. Have you ever read a Slate story on Monday afternoon and then had trouble finding it when you looked at the site on Wednesday morning? Now you won’t have to scroll down a long list of headlines hunting for the missing masterpiece. Simply click the box marked Monday,and you’ll see the archived home page in all its glory, almost exactly as it appeared on the most recent Monday. You can always get back to the current home page by clicking the appropriate box—it will be the day at the far right of the list.
We’ve also tweaked the home page’s layout a little. Rather than offering links to every story from the last seven days, we’ll now display the most recent 35 articles. (The number 35 is somewhat arbitrary, but we do think it makes for a home page of about the right length: substantial, but not overwhelming. If you want more stories, you can explore home pages from earlier in the week or check out our excellent Search function.) “News Fix,” where we offer quick headlines for our most frequently updated departments, has moved. Links to the most recent “Today’s Papers,” “International Papers,” “Explainer,” “Chatterbox,” and “Kausfiles” columns will now appear under the cover graphic. In News Fix’s old home at the top-right of our home page, we’ll have more space to showcase our latest stories.
Like most things on the Web, redesigns are a work in progress—there are more changes in the works for September—but we hope you like our new look.
