Officially announcing the all-new chromeunboxed.com v4.0

Believe it or not, there are plenty of viewers in our YouTube audience who watch our videos and have never ventured over to the website. And while I’m sure plenty of you watch our YouTube videos here, chances are many of you aren’t subscribed over there, either. I wouldn’t have believed it without the statistical evidence, but it’s true.

Both the website and the YouTube channel are vital to our operation and it could be argued that one is more important than the other, but the truth is Chrome Unboxed began life as a YouTube channel first and the website piece followed after. With that being the case, we wanted to formally announce the fourth major version of chromeunboxed.com not just here, but with a YouTube video as well to invite over those who’ve never given the website a spin. We hope to show you why we feel now is the best time ever to be here on the website – maybe for the first time.

A whole new layout

The first and most important part of this overhauled design is definitely the home page and post layouts. After realizing that our home page drives a huge portion of our overall traffic to the site, we decided it was time to make better use of that real estate. If you visited our site prior to this week, you remember the home page was a simple feed of our 12 latest posts and that was about it. That’s far from the truth, now.

Scrolling through the new Chrome Unboxed homepage, you’ll find the main feed up front, but you’ll also get a few other feeds right there in the top as well, helping more information hit your browser window right from the beginning. This section is followed by a few more helpful areas like the newletter sign up that now has the ability to multi-select your newletter of choice and subscribe right from the home page or sidebar on inner pages. It is joined by the all-new YouTube video player that highlights our 15 latest uploads with an in-line player and a quick link out to the YouTube channel proper.

On down the page you get six more mini-feeds of other content and a fully-functional Podcast player that will allow anyone to hear the latest podcast without leaving the home page. Didn’t know we had a podcast? Don’t feel bad, but don’t miss it either. We just passed 150 episodes and we’re implementing video moving forward, too.

With all this content surfaced on the homepage, we’re really excited about the ways our readers will be able to access all the different content we’re now making. Between posts, newsletters, YouTube videos and Podcasts, there’s a whole lot to love on the new chromeunboxed.com.

Fun new features

In addition to the new content sections on the homepage, we have a completely refreshed design language that still holds onto the look and feel of what we’ve had prior, but modernizes things a bit. My favorite additions all live in the header and I’m so glad to finally be introducing dark mode, an upgraded search and a sweet new sliding menu.

Dark mode is as simple as it sounds, and the site can now be viewed in a darkened theme with the click of a button. I’ve wanted this in place for a long time, and the way we did it here is simple, clean and effective and I’m so glad to have it not just for our readers, but for us as well.

The same is true of the upgraded search. We didn’t want an overly-bogged-down search on the site, but we also wanted a more robust way to find stuff on the site. The new search is more comprehensive, returning results based on way more than just the title of a post, and I’ve already found it to be far more helpful as I search for content on the site.

Then there’s the sweet new minimalist menu that I love dearly. I’m not a big fan of menus in general, and having the ability to have this slide in menu that is out of the way unless needed simply adds to the cleanliness of the site and give users a similar experience on mobile and desktop alike. In the end, it’s still just a menu, but I love the way it animates in and scales to work for any user on any device.

Finally, the addition of a sidebar in our posts and pages gives us the ability to get some of the things we used to put in content over into the sidebar and out of the main post stuff. Again, it’s a move that simplifies the site overall and I know I’m a bit biased, but I am loving the look, feel and vibe of our website now. Between the new fonts, improved organization, fun new toys, and overall cleanliness of the user experience, I’m very happy to tell everyone about this new, 4th version of our website. Hope you find some time to check it out. I hope it is genuinely helpful to you, and I hope you love it.