T-Squared: A fresh look for The Texas Tribune

Today our homepage received its first major facelift since 2013. Take a look!

We’ve simplified the layout, removed features that weren’t getting much love from readers and added a few new things, like trending stories. Some of the biggest changes are things you don’t actually see, but we think you’ll still notice. Our homepage, for instance, used to be one of the slowest-loading pages on our site. Now, thanks to this new design, it loads lightning fast.

While today marks a milestone in our site’s design, it’s a step along a path, not the destination. A little over a year ago, we adopted an evolutionary redesign approach. That means we committed to carefully and continually improving various areas of the Tribune’s website, testing and evaluating as we go, rather than ditching the old stuff, launching something completely new and hoping for the best.

Think of it as whittling versus chopping wood. We aim to continually evolve the site in small, thoughtful ways instead of taking big whacks that may miss their mark.

How will we know if what we’re doing actually improves the site — and more important, your experience? By talking to you, of course. Whether you love, hate or are ambivalent about the changes to our website, we want to hear from you.

Leading this process over the past year has been a rewarding and collaborative effort. Our designers and developers don't usually receive public recognition for their hard work, so I'd like to call out the amazing Ben Hasson, art director and lead visionary for the modern, purposeful visual design of our site, and Liam Andrew, content engineer extraordinaire who's leading our efforts to rebuild our content management system. And special thanks to our chief product officer Rodney Gibbs, creative director Jacob Villanueva, designer Emily Albracht and front-end developer Andrew Gibson, who have all contributed so much to our redesign efforts.