Ben WisemanWelcome to the new WIRED. This site is the culmination of more than two years of work by dozens of super-talented people, people I’m proud to have as colleagues. From the responsive layouts to the improved APIs that make the whole thing work behind the scenes to the journalism itself, we’ve reimagined every aspect of the WIRED experience. And we have improved it.
WIRED readers are the kind of people who want to know more than what. You want to know how and why. To that end, I want to walk you through our thinking on the new site—to tell you about the technology and design innovations that make this iteration of WIRED possible.
About
Scott Dadich is the editor in chief of WIRED.
Back in 1994 we launched Hotwired, the first site with original editorial content created for the web. It was a digital home for reporting on the future of science, business, design, and technology. You’ve come to trust us over the past two decades, but our growth online has sometimes come too quickly and with some pain. When I took over as editor in chief in 2012, WIRED had an archive of more than 100,000 stories. That’s good! But they were spread out over more than a dozen different databases, sections, and homepages tenuously connected by virtual duct tape and chewing gum. The cleanup process—onerous and without a shred of glamour—took almost 15 months. But finally, last year, our engineers rolled out a newly unified site architecture built atop a single streamlined WordPress installation. And you didn’t notice a hiccup. Maybe you saw that pages loaded a touch faster. Stories looked more WIRED.
That’s when the real rock-breaking started. With the site’s foundation now solid, our editorial, design, engineering, and product teams began to redesign for the most important screen in your life—your smartphone. As you can imagine, this was a bit more work than picking a fresh skin for your Winamp (Big Bento, anyone?). We settled on a card-based motif for both its flexibility and configurability.
Once we had that design locked, we found ways to expand it to other screens—desktop, laptop, tablet, and anywhere else you access WIRED. Our award-winning photographs are Retina-ready. Graphics are SVG sprites. I like the cards because no matter what the device, our homepage and section fronts are now immediately scannable, giving you a more accurate preview of the stories that define our world. Crucially, the new structure allows us to deploy WIRED’s signature bespoke fonts and improve the overall typographic fidelity of our layouts. This new WIRED is a more comfortable browsing and reading experience, its stories primed for sharing with friends and colleagues.
But none of that razzle-dazzle matters if you can’t get our pages to load. So we made a significant investment in decluttering and streamlining our code. WIRED’s director of engineering, Kathleen Vignos, has shared a bit more detail in this fascinating post, but I’ll summarize with this bit of good news: In most cases, the new site loads twice as fast. Our tech team stripped out over half of the browser calls, drastically reducing the need for the browser to repaint our web pages; as a result articles like the one you’re reading now load perceptibly faster. Image galleries and videos appear on demand. We’re even hosted on new state-of-the-art servers.
Even if you don’t notice any of that turboboosting, you’ll see an updated, simpler information architecture and site taxonomy. The original Hotwired was organized under the banner of six bright icons. We’ve picked up on that legacy with our six new section fronts: Business, Design, Entertainment, Gear, Science, and Security. A world-class team of editors and reporters, experts in their fields, runs each desk. Starting today, we’re going to update the site more frequently; the new section fronts should become your dashboards for the day’s news and feature stories. Even our physical newsroom reflects these changes; our offices are set up to facilitate communication and collaboration among our editors, designers, and developers. The team has a new metabolism to power the new site.
But we didn’t design the new WIRED to be perfect. We designed it to be perfected. We’ll continue to make the technology faster and more powerful, the stories more informative and more fun. In the process, I’m sure you’ll find areas we can improve. I hope you’ll let us know about them. We’re trying to make better stuff in cooler ways more often. We believe we’ve created both the tools and the platform for WIRED to grow and evolve as fast as the technologies we cover. And if we’ve done our jobs, we will inspire you—the most connected and influential minds on the planet—to embrace what’s next. Everything is changing. Get ready. Get WIRED.
