The main points for me are:
- The fonts for starters just don't look good. I'd re-visit that.
- The skinny horizontal menu
- The "More" links below each article summary need work. Its a little overwhelming and just runs on from the text.
I should note that I don't recall what it looked like pre-redesign.
- As others have said, the font.
- I get the whole "look like the front page of a real newspaper" vibe, but I think the contrast needs to be adjusted.
- I feel like my eyes don't know where to look first. That's most likely foremost a contrast problem, but there's probably some other tweaks that need to be done.
- The shape of your logo clashes with the implicit and explicit horizontal lines on the site. I don't know how to fix this short of getting rid of the jump in the logo.
- The font on the nav bar is too thin for the very heavy background color. The result is that every link on the nav bar looks blurry... as if the background color is bleeding into the font glyphs.
- The article meta-data takes up WAY too much vertical space. The chief offender seems to be the tweets list. I'd change this to one line. You already have an expander widget, so this wouldn't be too terrible on usability. To emphasize how many tweets there are, why not do a sparkline or "...and 47 others" at the end of the tweet line?
- Get rid of the "newest" column. Put it below the fold under "Who's hiring in tech". You might also steal Reddit's idea of having a box up top where you have the newest stories on rotation.
It's simply terrible. Really disappointed. I usually scan the site 3x5 times a day.
- functions more like a blog than an aggregate.
- emphasizes sponsors and sharing over the actual headlines.
- prominent sponsor section forces more headlines below the fold, only one or two relevant articles are displayed as a result.
- Newest headlines look like and are placed like Adwords.
- Newest headlines are squeezed so narrow it takes 6 lines of text to say 2 lines worth of information.
- barely any contrast between content and links so the content is now part of the "clutter" they sought to avoid.
- I just blocked(!) Sponsors and Hiring from the page, leaving a big white hole between the content and Newest.
Checkout Twitter Bootstrap 2 (uut next week) or Foundation. It will make your live so much easier, and the site will be a lot more readable.
http://www.markdotto.com/2012/01/24/bootstrap-2-ready-for-te...
and
Since it looks like you want to keep it simple and easy; for max compatibility, try just sans-serif. Sans-serif is Helvetica on a Mac, and Arial on a PC. Optima looks really bad at that small a font size, not to mention it looks terrible on a Mac (all smudged). Optima is not designed to be a web/display font.
As for the site, why is the JavaScript and CSS inline? Makes for pretty lousy caching...
I know sites have to make money, but the sponsored area detracts massively from the main stories and is the main area of focus, the page doesn't scale well at all, the font's too small and the characters are too close together.
In a world where The Verge and TechCrunch will cover (I'm guessing) 80% of the stories featured on there, there has to be something compelling to get people scanning, and I don't think this redesign is it.
body { line-height: 1.5; color: #333 }
The sponsored posts section disrupts the site and wastes massive space by utilizing only the top fraction, but requiring about 1/3 the width.
The site should be doing a radically better job at sub sets of data by this point. The tabs should be used for that. Instead there's a pointless "About" tab up there - so if I visit Techmeme 100 times, how many times do I need that tab?