So here it is – on the day we turn five we welcome our shiny new site and we're proud as punch with it

Date
3 April 2012

Come one, come all, feast your eyes and let your senses frolic in the newest version of It’s Nice That. Launched to coincide with our fifth birthday, it may strike some as a radical departure, but we’re thrilled with it and delighted to finally share it with you all.

Designed by our sister studio INT Works and built by the devastatingly clever chaps (and chapesses) at With Associates, the new site is the third iteration of It’s Nice That and arguably represents our biggest change to date.

The most obvious change is the move away from the linear blog style format. The showcase image up top will be used to glorify a piece of work we find particularly pleasing while the rest of the day’s content will be set up below. We felt that as we now post more than double the amount of work (as compared to this time last year) the time had come to pare down the homepage and largely let the visuals speak for themselves.

The clean, crisp design remains and has been enhanced to allow people to absorb and engage with content in a more direct, less cluttered way. We believe this new design better reflects the more dynamic editorial structure we now have in place.

Go through to an article page and you’ll find a much less rigid way of presenting content with more images shown on the page and pull quotes and slideshows able to break up larger bodies of text. The text has been made bigger, videos will play in larger format and we hope the upshot will be a far more rewarding experience for readers.

At the bottom of the homepage, Best of the Web will allow us to point you off to the best creative content to be found anywhere else online. We pride ourselves on our content but are open-minded enough to accept when a fellow site has done something particularly interesting or impressive. We hope that by flagging up others’ great content we’ll make It’s Nice That the first port-of-call for those interested in creativity in any context.

Of course it won’t have escaped your attention that we have also embraced more advertising. As an organisation we have grown massively over the past 18 months and we are cannot hope to maintain that growth if we don’t look at new ways of supporting the site. We are committed to ensuring the line between editorial and advertising is clearly drawn and are 100% confident we can stay true to our principles while making It’s Nice That even bigger and better over the coming years.

So that’s about it really. We realise that change is always a bit of a shock but every decision we have taken has been made for all the right reasons and we genuinely believe the new site is a massive step forward for us.

But it’s still a work in progress. We are particularly keen to hear your comments, reactions and suggestions and will take them all into account as we consolidate and consider further changes. You can email newsite@itsnicethat.com, contact us via our Facebook page or tweet us @itsnicethat – we massively appreciate all feedback.

Rob and the rest of the It’s Nice That team.

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About the Author

Rob Alderson

Rob joined It’s Nice That as Online Editor in July 2011 before becoming Editor-in-Chief and working across all editorial projects including itsnicethat.com, Printed Pages, Here and Nicer Tuesdays. Rob left It’s Nice That in June 2015.

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