Dear Newsgrape Community,

After an amazing week at the European Startup Festival 2011, with little sleep, lots of great feedback, hundreds of new acquaintances and full of inspiration it is time for us to head back to the office!

Thus, I would like to present to you our new Beta design that we've launched to make reading and writing on Newsgrape even simpler. 

I understand that many of the changes were profound and I want to make clear that we will spend the next couple of weeks together with you making the design even better.

The upgrade has reduced the complicated structure of the home page, magazines and articles overview and the E-Go onto one single side. This way, we could drastically reduce the overall Newsgrape, and create a cleaner interface.

The Challenge: To reduce Newsgrape and to structure it more simple.

The Result: One user interface, with fewer sub-pages.

What's New

Search

The live search makes navigation significantly more time efficient. Enter a keyword in the search bar above, and you've got all important results - authors, magazines, articles or tags - displayed at a glance and sorted by relevance.

Comments

Thanks to the feedback from our community we have concluded that the original markings of the comments often miss the target and don't have the desired effect. So instead, it is possible from now on to rate comments as positive or negative. Best rated comments will appear at the top. 

Homepage

Since the articles of the community will always be what it's all about, we have the reduced the range of our active influence. This guarantees that an article that the community is engaged in will also appear at the top. And the algorithms that determine the current rank of an item and place it accordingly, are being calibrated ongoingly and grow a little wiser every single day. 

E-Go

The E-Go is now an integral part of the home page, and now makes it easier to create different filter groups. Just select "Edit", and use simple "drag and drop" to order your subscriptions in different groups.

Magazines

Magazines on Newsgrape have also been part of the upgrade, however,  this is still work in progress as they are now being designed - together with your feedback.

Your input

I would like to invite you to send your recommendations, ideas, feedback and design suggestions by e-mail to hallo@newsgrape.com, to comment here or to post in the feedback forum, so we can design the new Open Beta together, and create an even better place to read and write. 

Kind regards from Vienna, 

Leo