I designed About.com homepage and then bailed (for reasons I rather not say). The homepage was like my first prototype, and it didn't get a chance to developed or fleshed out. It was also responsive, but they took that out for some reason.

They had to hire a expensive agency to finish the redesign. Their design still looks dated to me, circa 2009.

It's an improvement. But it's still terrible. My eyes can't figure out where to look.

Ugh, why is this not responsive? The type of content (and layout) is ripe for it. I just don't get it.

All I can say is... It's About f?%# time!

They've disabled horizontal scrolling, what a horrendous decision!

So not only is the site not optimised for a single screen resolution below 1280px wide, it actually prevents users from viewing the content at those viewport widths.

I'm gonna take a wild guess that their development team couldn't figure out why the viewport scrolled horiztonally at 1280px wide, so they just took out the sledge hammer and disabled it without thinking twice.

Oh yeah btw, the new design is awful.

This homepage has a pretty standard content design: photo, headline, and author.

Unfortunately, the website doesn't have a great resource of high quality, original images. Opening this homepage to see an endless glut of stock photography really exhausts the eyes, and makes the site seem incredibly spammy.

Hopefully they can get some good freelance photographers to provide some original content.

Yeah but the actual articles (and by that I mean how they look) still suck.

This is a great improvement! I remember when about.com used to have this awful page redirect loop back in the 2000's that would force you to stay on their site indefinitely... glad they're considering their users needs a lot more these days.

it looks like one of those spam link-bait sites.

that is a HUGE improvement

I gave it the 3-second analysis. My findings: it's too noisy.

It's just homepage? and it's not responsive? oh my...

perfect example of everything is important / nothing is important. This usually happens when designers are dictated too instead of heard.

Looks decent. It reminds me a lot of the new digg.com (but with slightly worse design).

I can't figure out what is about.com... really!

Looks a lot better. I think there needs to be more of a visual separation between the top section which i guess is showing popular or recent topics and the rest of the page which has individual sections. The <hr> didn't really help me until i started scrolling down and realizing the pattern.

Is it just the homepage and some section pages (technology) that got treatment? Probably a slow rollout.

I think the font choice is interesting. I think the homepage is very scannable though and pretty good. I like these pages: http://ipad.about.com/od/iPad_Guide/fl/Which-iPad-Should-You-Buy.htm

but the header is so weird.

I did a redesign for ChaCha here at DT about 9 months ago that only pieces got rolled out—some company issues there prevented the whole site being launched. Such a fun project and similar problems to deal with here.