A Beautiful New Look for Anglotopia

If you look around Anglotopia.net, things might look a little different. After years of using the same design and layout, we have rolled out a beautiful new design for Anglotopia.

This has been in the works for quite some time. I don’t want to bang on about all the wonderful design changes we’ve made and whatnot, but I wanted to say something so everyone would know that it’s us who have changed the design, and we’re not going anywhere.

The biggest change you will notice is that article pages are now a single column. We have ditched the old-school sidebar. It’s a final acknowledgment of the fact that 80% of readers look at this website on their phones and never see the sidebar, so it’s functionally useless. So, it’s gone. I’ll miss it! Many of our previous design traditions continue – our logo will stay the same, our fonts and colors are the same as well. Things are just laid out a little differently now and hopefully easier to read, no matter which device you’re reading on.

The entire new design is optimized to look great on mobile and tablet devices. There’s a new header, and footer area and the menu has been simplified to make it easier to hit Anglotopia’s key content sections. The homepage is still a work in progress (as are a few other new features). But overall, this is how Anglotopia will look for the next few years.

Now that we’ve done this, we can finally begin to roll out major new features that we’ve been planning, where the old design and software were a major limitation. This new software opens up a ton of new possibilities for us as we reboot Anglotopia in 2024.

If you have any feedback on the design and layout, let us know! When we switched over Londontopia’s theme last year, user feedback was critical in ironing out the bugs. If you come across any bugs or if anything looks weird, please let us know. Flipping the switch and changing 20,000 pages means that something will be broken somewhere. There’s a common issue where images aren’t centered correctly – we’re working on that.

Also, if the site feels a bit slow for you, please bear with us. We had to purge our entire cache when the new design went live, so that means it’s going to take a few weeks for it to rebuild with the new layouts. The deeper you go into the Anglotopia, the slower is will be, for now. But it’s only temporary. We’re working hard to mitigate it behind the scenes.

So, please have a look around and let us know what you think!