Warning: SMS Text News update coming soon

Just in case anyone gets shocked to the core, I thought I should raise this issue now.

We’ve got an update coming.

I’ve engaged a team of shit-hot interface and web design geniuses who took one look at the current SMS Text News layout and then glanced at each other, knowingly, probably thinking to themselves, ‘We’re gonna need a bigger boat…”

Anyway, revisions and updates later — we now have a style. I was initially hunting for a GigaOm style look. You know, something fancy, something stylish. Then I agreed with the assertation that SMS Text News is, fundamentally, a news update site.

So the style is quite different from the current. A lot more newsy.

I like to think of SMS Text News as a blog. A blog, not a site that delivers news updates. However it’s rather difficult to ignore the fact that even I sometimes can’t find what’s happening on a daily basis. I have to either refer to the RSS feed or sit and peer through the wordpress article list. Alex and I have frequently published the same article because each of us didn’t notice the other’s posting. That’s because it was burried deep amongst 15 other news articles from that day.

Sometimes we get so much news in on one day that we are actually publishing 20+ posts a day. That’s because each is often time sensitive. We want to tell you now. Not tomorrow. Now and again we can organise some news items to be published across the week.

…Only for our lead story — or really special feature — to be drowned by other updates.

So we’re organising the site a little better.

We’re making a bit more use of white space.

The clutter, which, er, is a favourite and a simultaneous annoyance of mine, is disappearing. Short term anyway.

We’re going to have lead articles. That is, stuff we reckon is very important vs stuff that is just good to know. There’s nothing worse than being sat in the office of a mobile company and having a chap say, ‘Hey, let’s find that article you published this morning,’ only for us to all sit there scrolling and me explaining, ‘Er, no if you click on previous articles…, yes, click AGAIN on previous … right… now use the Ctrl+F to find…’.

If you’re a reader of the RSS feed, sit back and relax, nothing will change at all.

By the way, if you have some feedback, it is always, always welcome. Either publish here as a comment or mail me.