Over the last few weeks, www.wpcentral.com has been undergoing some changes in design. The first part was the header at the top displaying featured articles, or news stories related to what you are reading. We then followed up with up and down voting on the main site. Over the last 24-hours, we have been tweaking the mobile version of Windows Phone Central, found at m.wpcentral.com.
Let us not beat around the bush: the m.wpcentral.com site over the last few weeks was almost torturous to use. The ads were too many, too large, and the scrolling was subpar. We heard your complaints, and we agree with them, so we are pleased to show you a new layout, with optimized performance!
Heading now to m.wpcentral.com on your phone should result in a much faster and less frustrating experience. Ads are now just 5% of the display space on initial load, versus the previous version, which was unacceptable. Additionally, the layout is different with an all-new mobile template, showing more articles per page. Jumping into an article, it will no longer load featured-articles at the top, reducing data usage and browsing speeds (it still works on the full desktop view though).
These changes, fixes, and improvements are not the last, however. There are still some more modifications coming to the view within the article, and tweaks elsewhere, but the elimination of the aforementioned 'pain points' address the biggest complaints you folks had with the site.
We aim to make you, our community happy, so thanks for sticking through our growing stages with the new website design! For us, it is a matter of delivering a great user experience, while still scrapping enough to keep the lights on at Mobile Nations – it is never an easy balance, but we are doing our best. (I would also like to thank our hardworking dev team for their efforts).
Don't forget, all of these mobile changes are also found on our sister sites, including iMore, Android Central, CrackBerry and Connectedly.
ALERT - Forums and the WPCentral app
Over the last few days, we have been experiencing an issue with the Tapatalk API, our forums and our app, resulting in errors.
We are aware of the forum problem and Jay Bennett, our app developer, will solve it as soon as he is back from vacation, which in Europe I believe is 14 weeks or something. Kidding aside, he will get a fix out as soon as he can. However, feel free to remind him, repeatedly, on Twitter @JayTBennett ;)
