The Latest Changes to SeekingAlpha.com 62 comments
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Today we're launching some significant changes to the Seeking Alpha website. We've replaced the "hover over and drop down" navigation at the top of the page with clickable tabs. Those tabs link to dashboards that display all the new articles on the site in five intuitive groups, as well as clear navigation to the sub-topics in more depth. We've also added buttons for Breaking News (Wall Street Breakfast and Market Currents) and Transcripts (which houses our new, improved Transcript Center).
These changes were driven by one goal: to make it faster and easier to find articles on Seeking Alpha.
When I announced the last set of changes we made, we received a ton of valuable feedback. The clearest request from readers was to re-instate the page that shows all the latest articles on the site in reverse chronological order. So we've rebuilt that page, and provided a link to it on the home page ("See all of today's headlines") and in the Quick Links box ("Latest Articles") below the search box.
We've made some significant improvements to our news coverage. You can now view Market Currents, our real time market and news product, in two modes. The default mode shows the latest items at the top of the page; if you leave the page open, it automatically refreshes when new items are added. An alternative mode: to catch up on what's happened so far, you can switch the order so the earliest items are at the top, and that turns off auto-refresh. We've also grouped Market Currents with Wall Street Breakfast, our morning digest of top headlines. Now you can quickly check the top headlines, and then switch tabs to see what's happened since the market opened. (There's no Wall Street Breakfast today because the market is closed.)
We've made more incremental improvements to the Transcripts Center. Search is now easier than ever: you can quickly find transcripts, or search across all the transcripts for a single phrase. We've also made it easier to view the most popular transcripts. There's more to announce in the near future; we'll keep you posted.
We grappled with three questions about the new navigation changes, and would appreciate readers' input on them:
- The Big Picture. We wanted to group together in one page all the latest articles about the overall stock market and its key drivers, including the economy, the price of oil and commodities, earnings, bonds, and the state of the housing and credit markets. The most intuitive title we could think of for this page is The Big Picture. But that has two disadvantages. First, Barry Ritholtz writes an excellent blog (highly recommended) with the same name, and we don't want to cause confusion. (Here's Google's listing of Big Picture websites for reference. Update: I just noticed that Roger Nusbaum, one of my favorite reads on ETFs, also uses "The Big Picture", and a reader comment below states the IBD has a column called "The Big Picture".) Second, we're unsure whether the name is informative enough. What do you think? Will we reduce traffic to Barry's blog (we don't want to do that)? Can you suggest a better name?
- Fast navigation. In our old navigation scheme, you could find articles about China with a hover-over and a click. Now you need to click once (on Global Investing) to see the most recent articles about China, and click again if you want to see the full list of articles about China. To make it easy to find all the themes from the old drop downs, we've presented them in large type in the left-hand side bar of the new dashboards. But is the navigation clear enough?
- Colors. Our choice of colors for the new tabs was driven by only one consideration: how to make them as easy as possible to use. White on orange was has good visibility, and we added two blue tabs for Breaking News and Transcripts because they're different in nature from the other articles on the site and we wanted to make it easy to find them. But let's admit it -- the colors are a break from our old color scheme, and don't fit that well. Any thoughts on the colors?
User testing and statistical analysis of the new scheme versus the old one suggests that it's a big improvement. But changes take getting used to, and we know that the intial reaction of some users will be frustration. We hope that as you try out the new tabs and dashboards, you'll find the site easier and more enjoyable to use.
Let us know what you think.
--------------------------
Update: Monday, September 8th, 7.30 am:
Thank you to all the readers who provided feedback and suggestions. Barry Ritholtz has asked us to change the name of "The Big Picture" tab. I emailed him yesterday as follows:
We're currently planning to change the tab names and sizes (requiring new graphics) in our next code release. Why? Because we constantly strive to provide the best possible experience for our readers, and also respect your wishes and goals... The change is slated for the near future (but not tomorrow). We invest careful preparation and testing in each new code release before upload, and do releases only over weekends when the market is closed and traffic is lower.
We're still debating which name to use in place of "The Big Picture". Any further ideas or feedback on the suggestions below would be welcome.
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This article has 62 comments:
I don't think you should use "The Big Picture" if that's already the name of someone's inveting blog. Use words drawn from your own description of what the tab is about: "...all the latest articles about the overall stock market and its key drivers, including the economy, the price of oil and commodities, earnings, bonds, and the state of the housing and credit markets." Maybe "Overall Stock Market."
The new navigation approach seems fine.
Congratulations for continually trying to upgrade the site.
I must study something new today, Lets go to Seeking Alpha.
Thanks!
Color is no big deal, it will look normal in a week, just used to the old scheme. If you want to try something else maybe instead of an orange box just make it a two pixel outline of a box in orange and then have the inside of the box your regular maroon color and text in white.
Big Picture blog is really good, I like Barry's stuff. Maybe you can go with something like Market Landscape, Economic Rundown.
Kudos on seeking user feedback.
Thank you.
Thanks for putting back the author names for articles (the show/hide button is very useful) and the all articles stream.
Overall, the site looks great :)
But this is a detail in a great site!
I also agree that The Big Picture sounds too much like other blogs. Several of the above suggestions are better, esp. Market Landscape. Or maybe something simple like Market Overview.
A last request would be for those of us on the west coast, is it possible to have news and articles that don't stop when we're eating lunch?
So we'll push to keep standards high on our end, and on your end I suggest a couple things:
1) Sign up for a watchlist of authors whose writing you appreciate and who are consistently strong, in your opinion; and
2) I think you'll find the articles featured in the 'Opinion and Analysis' section of our homepage to be consistently high quality; also, visit our 'Editor's Picks' for articles that we found to be particularly well researched and argued.
If you'd take the time to drop me a line when you find an article that you feel isn't up to our standards, I'd appreciate it: mick@seekingalpha.com
You and your team have a winner here. Excellent overall look, better intuitive naviagation and organization yields quick direction to what users are looking for. The colore scheme is a nice upgrade too.
A comment on the navigation buttons. It's clear you've expanded the Sector Dashboard into two pages: The Big Picture and Stocks & Sectors. A minor point here, but you have Housing/Real-Estate on the Big Pic but you have Financials on the Sectors page. Why? It seems to me that both topics belong on the Big Picture due to their powerful effects on our current conditions. However, as we cycle out of this bear market into healthier times, Housing and Financials will be more fitting on the Sector page. Tough to draw lines so maybe it's just best as is, it just stood out to me as an inconsistancy.
Anyway, I'm very pleased with what you all have done here. I knew you would be able to find that win-win format. Well done!
Best regards,
David Weston
p.s. Big Picture alternatives:
1. The Big Picture (leaving it would probably be okay if Barry and Roger are okay with it.)
2. The Situation Room
3. WallStreet Winds or Market Winds
4. Market Map
5. Market Compass
6. Today's Economy
For that reason, we put Housing & Real Estate in The Big Picture, but Homebuilders in Stocks & Sectors.
I think you're right about the importance of financials: they're a key driver of this market.
We'd be really interested to hear from you: how do you access the site? Do you use text-to-audio software, and if so, how well does it run on Seeking Alpha?
Out of the alternative names that have been suggested in the comments here, is there one that stands out to anyone?
I like the new 'dashboards' but miss the ability to jump to different sectors etc. straight from the home page.
Over all the site feels crisp and performance is very snappy - how do you guys get those pages to pop up so quickly?
I can indentify with Rob Goldpalm - I'm sometimes left wondering what the point of publishing certain posts is.
Two examples I came across today: They do no more than summarize old news:
seekingalpha.com/artic...
and
seekingalpha.com/artic...
Overall, though, a great website with unparalleled breadth.
The only suggestion I would make is in addition to the Transcripts area is there any way possible to have a section which would include webcasts of investor days or investment conferences featuring all the different companies and their presentations. I know breifing.com highlights these events currently with web pages, but the site does not provide each individual webcast.
No great shakes if this concept is not implemented. I just think it would offer the site and its visitors yet another valuable source of information many of the sites fail to provide. Seeking Alpha has done a great job with the blogging concept of investing and its model is being imitated by several others but not with the success you folks have done.
Keep up the good work!
The new changes and colors are awesome. During our last email exchange I mentioned how much I liked the dashboards but I miss the navigational drop downs. As you mentioned in your article, I now have to click twice to get to a specific area instead of just once. Was there a reason for getting rid of those drop downs beyond site load time and navigation on Blackberrys?
Market Landscape seems to stand out as the best replacement for "Big Picture" or you could also go with Marketscape.
Regards,
Asif
www.SINLetter.com
Alternatives:
1. Macro Trends
2. Market Forecasts
3. Forecasting Markets
4. Market Opinions
5. Integrating Markets
6. Market Points of View
7. Points of View
8. Macro Points of View
9. Macro Views
10. Marco Opinions
12. Your Market Views
13. Your Macro Views
14. Starting Points
15. What It Means
16. Market Backgrounders
17. Forecasts
18. Predictions
19. Macro Predictions
20. Macro Analysis
Come up with your 5 favorite and conduct a poll.
2. I'd like to see more on options trading ideas, analysis, strategies, etc. I guess you don't get a lot of contributions.
3. Under investment ideas (should be speculation ideas), you don't offer income ideas.
4. Where is technical analysis? David Fry? Market and trade timing? It's becoming more important to savvy traders.
5. Need a section on Gurus, what they're doing.
6. Need a section on Political Economics or Economic Politics.
Another consideration is that many readers subscribe to industry/sector coverage, and we can provide news-like coverage from sector expert bloggers that is at times superior to what the major news outlets provide. But we want to avoid regurgitated press releases like the plague it is (causing the slow, painful death of mainstream news outlets), so thanks for the reminder.
We don't publish pure technical analysis. Dave Fry and other SA contributors who do use TA use it in conjunction with fundamental analysis. That's an editorial requirement from us, and is a reason why we don't create a separate section for TA. And in general, we're not aiming to cover short-term trading (where some find TA useful), but rather medium- to long-term investing.
Point taken on Gurus - we've been thinking of the best way to cover their portfolios and portfolio changes. What would you like to see?
Re. political economics, we do have two tags that you may want to follow/bookmark/subscr... to:
The Economy: seekingalpha.com/tag/e...
Elections: seekingalpha.com/tag/e...
I like 'The Macro View' best as a replacement for The Big Picture.
1. Portfolio lists, symbols, possibly with recent changes.
2. Tags.
3. Reports on their comments on individual stocks.
4. Charts (weekly, monthly) comparing their portfolios with major indexes.
5. The home page for each stock could include a Gurus link that would show which gurus own the stock.
6. Writers could be encouraged to write about the Gurus' portfolios and individual stocks as well as about their performances, trading styles, etc.
7. Link to each Guru's web site.
also, good timing on the revision to SA as it seems September is going to be the month of several financial sites launching new versions. The upcoming days and weeks will be exciting as new layouts are expected from large sites like the wsj to smaller financial news sites that attract around 1mm monthly uniques.
on another note, when i opened sa yesterday and saw thebigpicture tab, i thought to myself, i can't believe ritholtz's big picture got its own tab on SA (obviously, i understood once i clicked on it). i don't think barry will like that as a tab heading, but if he doesn't mind, then i'd say keep it.
good work.
doron
latimesblogs.latimes.c.../