There are aspects of The Verge's redesign that kinda mirror things I wanted to do with a blog/news-focused website for years. Like I think I get what they were going for and I think I understand why, exactly, they'd think that this is the right way to go. The quote going around about how they wanted to be able to "tweet at their own website" is dumb out of context, but when I think about how I wanted to evolve news coverage and post lengths and all that stuff, it actually makes total sense to me and isn't the worst way of wording it. It's got good bones! I just don't know that I especially care for the way the ideas were implemented all that much.
I mean, no shade to anyone who worked on it, launching redesigns is tough, insane work that requires a mix of vision for what you need to be doing next and being able to anticipate what your users will want to do with your thing in the future. I've been a part of some good redesigns and some extremely bad ones over the years. I've also been a part of some great redesigns that got rejected or totally nerfed after the fact by cowards who couldn't stand the heat from the business side of things when SEO invariably tanks post-launch.
Anyway, seeing stuff like The Verge makes me want a website all over again, stupid as that may be. It'd be pointless without a team in place to actually make shit to go on the site, naturally, but I spent too many years fighting too many fights about resources I couldn't have for cool-seeming features I wanted to implement to just, like, turn that part of my brain off completely.
Perhaps, over time, this feeling will fade! If not, uh... well, shit, I don't know.
