Vator's new look and design

Thank you Microsoft and Web Royal for the new UI!

If you haven't noticed, Vator just released a new user interface. It's especially noticeable on the homepage and the newsroom.

Before I explain why we did this and what we changed,  I want to thank a few people involved.

First off, I want to thank Microsoft, and specifically Jacob Mullins, for hosting a competition on Vator to find top Web designers and developers. One of the prizes for the winner was to work with the Vator team to redesign our site. The winner of that event was Web Royal, a design and development company, based in Miami. Thanks to Chris Sands of Web Royal for working tirelessly to get this new site out before Vator Splash - which is going to be standing-room only! I also want to thank Metric Lab, which conducted the very first heuristic test on our site. Based on their input, we proceeded to determine what changes were needed.

I also want to point out that - as is often the case during a release - certain items are overlooked. In this case, our "search" box went missing. This probably ranks pretty low on the list of missing features for major releases. After all, I still recall Google Video launching without video. But it was worth noting, nonetheless, as a lesson to us all: At times you won't have everything during release time. Our search box will be back soon.

So, what did we change? First off, probably the most obvious chanage was the navigation bar at the very top of the site. We originally didn't want the navigation bar to confuse people and, being a minimalist that I am, I wanted to drive people to two things: Our news and our company updates from startups in our community. 

But it turns out, this was probably more confusing to people because we are not just about news and updates. We are much more. We are a growing community with much to offer. Moreover, the homepage look and navigation was very different from the rest of the site. In fact, every tab had different navigations. It was a bit of a mess. So, we asked Web Royal to provide some cohesiveness to the site.

As you can see from the new homepage, we also highlight our growing community. We now have nearly 50,000 entrepreneur members and companies. Many members use our site to connect and to learn from one another through their company profiles. We wanted others to know that connecting and learning were becoming the core activities on Vator.

Our old homepage below provided very little guidance to those coming onto Vator. And, we wanted to make sure current and new users saw the benefits more clearly. Hopefully, we provided more clarity with our new homepage.

Below is our old homepage:

We are now also highlighting our videos more prominently.

Many people have asked us to put our videos on our homepage to make them more accessible. As many of our community members and readers and viewers know, Vator has a growig library of videos of entrepreneurs. The videos that are always asked about and searched for tend to be those that are about lessons learned and advice. So, we put a "Video Top Picks" on our homepage and our newsroom to make those videos more accessible.

We also have a robust competition platform. Over the past nine months, we've worked to develop this platform to include comprehensive functionality and flexibility for any university or competition organizer. We wanted to highlight our ability to create and host such competitions as well as showcase the current competitions so our entrepreneur members could take advantage of the many opportunities to present onstage or win prizes.

You will also notice our VatorNews newsroom has a bit more of a blog format. Here's the new look below.

We've never been prolific in producing news (typically two to three and sometimes eight pieces a day max). But as of this week, we're ramping that up as a way to keep our readers better informed about what's happening in the world of startups. While we realize there are many tech blogs already covering such news, we will strive to provide our readers and viewers some unique analysis and in-depth enterprising stories.

We will also still have a very strong focus on "Lessons Learned" and advice pieces, in keeping with our mission to educate entrepreneurs.

Additionally, you'll notice the navigation bar has changed as well as the sub-navigation. You'll also note on the new newsroom page that we're able to highlight our popular videos, which we couldn't do before. 

Our old newsroom design is here:

We hope you enjoy our new site and we welcome any feedback.