edgitarra said:
Thanks for the feedback!
Well, the 10-second part is easy: Average session duration across all SOTT sites is currently 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Average pages viewed per session is 2.4. For a long time, we were hovering around 1 page/session. Time passed, and even though the design of the page didn't change, suddenly we're at 2.4 pages/session. Thus, people are already reading. Tons of traffic is coming from Facebook. The moral here for me anyway was that it isn't one thing that decides the success or failure of a site. Was it better content? More content? Sharing on FB? More people taking an interest as the world falls apart? Many of those factors are hard to measure.
And then, many popular web sites break every design rule there is. So, my approach tends to be a bit more multi-faceted, especially since I'm the one who has to come up with the design, and then rewrite the custom app to make it work, and then optimize everything to make it fast, and then make sure it's still secure, and then... Well, you get the idea. I also try to keep in mind that if we have the best content (which I don't write), then we could even have the ugliest site in the universe, and people would still love it.
It's actually interesting that several people have remarked to me that the new site is easier to read. The fact is that the main column content hasn't changed much at all. The main column is 60px wider than before, and the header bars have changed slightly. Other than that, stuff like fonts, font sizes, line spacing, and white space are all exactly the same as before! So, it seems that simply having "less clutter" equals the perception of "easier to read" for some people, at least. Well, that works both ways. If a person doesn't like the new design, they will find it "more difficult to read". That's just your basic human psychology.
edgitarra said:
The menu icon is a variation of The Hamburger Button, which is quite widespread and popular, especially with the advent of Mobile Madness. No, not everyone will recognize it as such, but then on the old site, we had people e-mailing us saying "I can't find the Login button!". And then we had to reply and say, "Well, you see, you simply click the text "Login" at the top of the page." Was that bad design? No, because the vast majority found it just fine. Is the current login button easier or harder to see? Heck, I dunno. We'll find out! But I stole that idea from dotMailer, and it seems to work well for them. As usual, a lot of the new stuff is an experiment. Things will definitely change more. They always do!
As for the flag, I looked at tons of sites, and flag = language is rather common. If it's common, it should be recognizable. Plus, I don't think many people will use it. French speakers come to French SOTT from FB. Do they want to read English articles? Maybe, maybe not... And then on the other hand, you have sites like huffingtonpost.com, where I had to scroll up and down the page, looking for 30 seconds before I found the pulldown menu at the top that
says: Edition: FR
That doesn't mean that what I did on SOTT is best, and I know we're violating all kinds of design rules! But then, I violate all kinds of programming rules all the time. I do it because those rules are limiting in some way. The SOTT app actually violates the standard MVC architecture horribly, but because it does so, its caching system results in page generation times that are several times faster than most dynamic Rails apps. In fact, from benchmarking, the SOTT app can generate a page WAY faster than WordPress (even with caching, in many cases). The new design actually improved page generation speed even more, and it is now highly optimized for fast load and rendering in the reader's browser.
Well, it can always be better, in every way. There will no doubt be more changes in the future, but we need to acquire some stats and more user feedback.
There was no sidebar when viewed from a tablet either; and Scottie has confirmed, it's the settings that hide it. 
