Bolt's Facelift (repost)
Posted by anastasia on 08-03-2004My friend Aaron over at Bolt emailed today and was asking what I thought of the redesign. I thought to myself, I know I posted about the redesign back when I spotted the press release. Alas, the Bolt resdesign post is now one of the "lost posts," deleted by my hosting company and not backed up in time by me. Before I try to recreate my impressions of Bolt's new look, can anyone out there recommend a good, stable hosting company that I should switch to? I've had it with mine.
Now on to Bolt's new look. Overall I like it. It's a big improvement – a lot less blinky and cluttered. They've streamlined the navigation to go across the top and then repeat in tabs with channel content highlighted on the lower half of the page. There's a lot more space for advertising – so much so that having one sponsor buy both homepage spots (see the National Guard ads currently running) kind of overwhelms the content. It does feel like Bolt has really gotten into the blogging format with all of their channel designs looking and feeling more like blogs as well as planning to offer blogs (journals) for users on the site (this is good).
I have to confess I have a personal knowledge of Bolt's evolution since I was friends with one of their early employees back when I was at Teen Voices. The early version of Bolt was much more content focused, with a student network of journalists reporting on stories across the country (teen-written, Bolt edited). Then it shifted to being completely community oriented/user-generated and has remained that way. The new design to me streamlines the different types of user/community content and makes it easier to use.
The Bolt press release also announced the introduction of a new program called Connectors "which utilizes the site's most influential members to build buzz about brands." So my question on this is how do they do it without being transparent (and annoying to other users?). Remember what happened with Raging Cow.
