We hope it is obvious that the GMBDW has been redesigned with a fresh new look and improved functionality. For those of you who don’t like change, we once again want to emphasize that that all prior content and functionality has been maintained. We undertook the redesign with two key points in mind. First, we wanted to preserve the same basic format of the publication so as not to overly disrupt the user experience. Second, we wanted to return to the newspaper look and feel that characterized our original publication with which some of you are undoubtedly familiar. We believe that we have met both goals as well as bringing many improvements that include:
- A more modern “flat” design with far fewer visual distractions.
- A home page that contains previews instead of entire articles making it easier to see at a glance what is important for you.
- Article pages which have eliminated most of the side-columns and are therefore less distracting.
- Improved search results that will be much easier to process and are far more “Google-like.”
- Improved display of GMBDW Wiki entries which are now underlined in their first appearance on a page.
- An improved donation form that will make it even easier to support our work.
Despite what we consider to be these important improvements, there are ongoing issues with which we struggle to cope:
- A large portion of the GMBDW Wiki entries are still empty due to limited resources and large demands on our time but in the next days we plan to introduce a work around that we trust will help until the day arrives when the Wiki can be completed.
- “Broken” links continue to be an issue as they are for all publications of our type and we are unfortunately not able to serve as an archive for lost pages. Where the problems links are internal, we will try to fix them over time. Where resources linked to have disappeared from the Internet, we suggest you try the Wayback Machine which can often find what you are looking for. If not, some creative research may turn up the item if you are lucky. If readers would like to do us a great service, please forward any corrected links together with the page on which the original broken link was found and we will fix ASAP.
- Some pages, particularly older ones, may contain more than one typo and other small errors. We do the best we can to avoid and/or catch these things but resources do not permit us to edit to 100% perfection and as most of you probably realize, spell checkers can be a modern plague! As with broken links, if readers can forward problem pages to us with typos noted, we would be very grateful and promise to fix them, time permitting.
So, we hope users find the redesign as pleasing as we do and, as always, we welcome feedback by means of the contact form.
(Note: To mark the launch of the new design, we will be bringing you two important Featured stories based on our new Arabic Monitoring feature, so check with us soon.)