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You may have noticed late last Friday we updated the LittleSis look. For months we’ve been asking our designer friends for help developing a site redesign plan, and we finally

You may have noticed late last Friday we updated the LittleSis look. For months we’ve been asking our designer friends for help developing a site redesign plan, and we finally made our first steps towards implementing it. The changes so far aren’t exactly radical, but looking at the old design now makes us cringe a bit. Consider us relieved. If you don’t feel the same, we want to hear about it!

First off, we should recognize our main muses: Han Yu, Ali Felski (of Sunlight Foundation), and Mushon Zer-Aviv. If you don’t like the new design, blame us; if you like it, blame them. They’ve thrown some great ideas at us, many of which are still unrealized.

The first thing you’ll notice is that we nixed the old splash page, the one with the yearbook-style array of faces, the “Enter” link, and not much else. The reason we created that page to begin with was the avalanche that greeted our visitors at our real home page. Instead of solving the avalanche, we hid it behind a link that everyone had to click on anyway! As Eddie put it, now it’s much more relaxed. There’s a box at the top that concisely explains the site and presents easy navigation to our revamped About and Get Involved pages. If you get tired of looking at the intro box, you can hide it for a week, or sign in to your account.

You’ll also notice the debut of our mini-profile format, which we hope to employ elsewhere on the site sometime soon. Mini-profiles help give visitors the idea that relationships are at the core of LittleSis. The “Featured Profiles” section draws from our featured blog post (appearing on the same page), as well as a secret list of well-researched names we keep. Our “Top Analysts” have been removed (we’ll honor them in other ways). The notes below the blog section — and throughout the site — are still awkwardly construed, but we’ll work on them soon enough.

A few other changes are worth mentioning. The logo has been made less ballooney. It still needs the work of professional hands, but we like the leaner style. The whole page header has been shrunk down so it doesn’t take up so much of the page; this should be majorly helpful to folks like us with vertically-challenged screens. The colors are darker, and fonts across the whole site have been changed to Arial.

Our next step will probably be reorganizing profile pages. We’d like the list of direct relationships to say more about each related person or organization, perhaps similar to our mini-profiles. We’d also like to place more emphasis on the second-degree relationships (currently buried in the “Interlocks”, “Giving”, etc, tabs). If you have ideas, we’d love to hear/see them.