May 01--Even an area man would notice there's something new about The Onion.
More than just the story asserting that "Parents of Crying Child Must Not Be Any Good," the satirical online newspaper based in Chicago Friday showed off a redesigned website aiming to bring theonion.com up to contemporary standards, editor-in-chief Cole Bolton said.
"We've perfected the Internet," Bolton asserted, before talking more seriously about the redesign, which he described as cleaner, simpler and easier to navigate. "Our previous site was pretty terrible," Bolton said.
It now features less clutter, a new navigation bar and infinite scroll, where new material keeps appearing as you scroll down the page, rather than the reader reaching an endpoint and having to move to a new page.
"To get the most out of this interactive experience, readers are encouraged to constantly scroll downward on their browsers at all times, during every moment of every day," a page on the site explaining the changes says, "...until your body eventually reaches such a point of exhaustion and dehydration that your organs shut down and you cease being of any value to The Onion."
The explainer does not neglect the new importance of mobile browsing, which Bolton said now accounts for the majority of site traffic. "The Onion's website is specifically designed to be enjoyed on Motorola's popular 2004 edition of the RAZR cell phone," the page about the changes said.
Quick testing, however, revealed it also works on a recent-model Samsung Galaxy S5, as well.
The site also adds a new parenting section, After Birth, highlighting stories like the one about parents' perceived incompetence, and a video blog, "Mothershould."
The website hadn't really been updated since the Onion dropped its last print editions a year-and-a-half ago, Bolton said. But in a dose of irony that Onion readers may appreciate, if not actually find funny, the new site now looks a little more like a newspaper.
"We sort of designed it based on our print edition, how the front page looked," said Bolton.
