The vulture gets a new set of feathers

By Chris Williams

Yesterday, The Register, the enterprise IT publication I spent years editing while managing a crew of writers, unveiled a substantial redesign.

While the near-thirty-year-old publication has iterated on its design in the past (a quick search reminded me of a 2018 layout trial), this is easily the biggest departure in recent memory. They've moved away from the usual rigid, aligned rows of content that defined El Reg for ages in favor of a much more free-flowing layout.

It has clear hero content at the top to read first that's engaging, then sections of special interest amid a flood of news. There's a navigation bar along the top again that makes it plain to visitors what this publication is all about. Data centers, security, software developers, open source, and more.

The sister sites The Next Platform, Blocks and Files, and DevClass have undergone similar redesigns at the same time.

The plumbing and the pivot

I’ll leave it to the Reg team to tell the full story behind why the change happened now. Suffice it to say, when you’re dealing with a publication this size, the visual shift is often just the tip of the iceberg; the real work is usually happening in the plumbing below.

I was involved in the early planning for this redesign, before I left in 2025, though the current team pretty much did all the work. I like that they've made bold changes and broken out of the mold of previous years. It signals the publication is willing to take risks and evolve.

Let's take a quick wander down memory lane and remember how the site used to look:

  • Back in 2000, which is about when I started to read the site, it had the same kind of free-flowing columns it now has albeit with a simpler aesthetic.
  • It still wasn't lined up in 2002.
  • In 2005, it moved to the fixed rows that it held onto for years.
  • By 2009, it had honed the three-column, fixed-row layout it would become known for. I joined in 2011 when it looked like this.
  • By the mid-2010s, it gained a dominating hero box at the top to direct readers' attention, while keeping the fixed layout.
  • By 2021, the site had moved to a dot-com and switched to four columns of fixed rows.
  • And as I was handing in my badge and notepad, the site looked like this. It had a four-column layout that broke for ads and special sections that highlighted in-depth pieces and hands-on guides.

And that takes us to today's four-column layout that's a combination of the 2000-era free-flowing approach with the 2020 era's big hero boxes and special sections. Remember that a lot of traffic to El Reg came through the front door out of loyalty, and that's a luxury that most online publications don't have. It meant the name of the game was to direct these homepage seekers to where we thought they ought to start but still give them a menu of options of other cool articles to read. Whenever we heard the phrase, "the homepage is dead," we'd laugh into our martinis.

Thick skin and a sliver of advice

To the team: keep at it. Redesigning a site with a non-trivial readership as informed, engaged, and... let's say opinionated... as El Reg’s requires a very thick skin. Looking at the early forum feedback, it seems the traditional "everything was better in 1998" crowd is out in full force, complaining about the lack of a grid structure on the homepage even though in 1998 the site had unaligned rows. Maybe everyone got used to the grid.

My advice? Hold your ground. It’s important to try something new, even if it ruffles a few feathers. The soul of the site — the info-dense, fast-loading, acerbic core — is still there. I can imagine there will be some tweaks over the coming weeks, as any redesign goes through. Revisiting some of the heading sizes and styling, and perhaps going easy on some of the rectangles and borders, may be all it takes to polish the new look.

If anyone's really upset with the layout, just browse the archive page which has the earlier fixed-row layout.

Some recent reads

Since we're talking about El Reg and its stablemates, here are just a few articles that I’ve particularly enjoyed in the past few days: