LaineyGossip.com is getting a glow-up in the next week or so (we hope)! Please know that we have been working on this for several months and could not have anticipated how the world would be when we would be ready to launch. The site has looked the same for nearly nine years with only a few cosmetic changes and a couple of mobile website changes along the way, and we’re severely overdue for a makeover – and, more importantly, an improvement in functionality. This is a guide to the updates before we hit the “go” button in the days to come.
Those of you who have been visiting often and for a long time will find that the navigation elements of the new version are the same as what you have grown accustomed to. As always posts will run newest to oldest down the page with the day’s intro at the top, albeit with some movement to bring the newest posts closer to the top of the home page. Photo galleries will continue to be ad free and easily swipe-able. The rest we’re confident you’ll figure out on your own and we look forward to your feedback.
The new site will be coded on the backend in a more up-to-date language and will accommodate multiple screen sizes, including a new tablet view that will make everything easier on the eyes when using those “in-between” screen sizes. We’re also going to take some elements out of the peripheral areas of the site and run them within the article flow, and those too will become clear to you once you begin to navigate.
Why are we telling you all this now and not just launching the new look and then telling you about it?
Because of the new coding, some of you using older tablets and mobile devices will find that the new version of the site will not format how intended because the new site will require browsers to decipher a form of JavaScript that older browsers cannot fully handle. This was a conscious decision on our part to try to find a balance between the complexity of designing a responsive site while recognizing that technology has and will continue to change, and that most of you update your hardware every 2-3 years. So if you own an iPhone that is a “5x” version or older, or iPads released pre-2014, as well as some older Android devices, we hope you’ll still visit us on your desktops or other devices you may have.
And now for a little bit of LaineyGossip Show Your Work.
As already mentioned, our plans to relaunch the site this way began long before the recent COVID-19 outbreak. Our initial plan was to keep the ad experience as un-intrusive as it has been over the last several years on LaineyGossip, with a few strategic placements that take advantage of the smarter layout.
Then COVID-19 happened. And while it hasn’t changed much about the core elements of our redesign, you may start to see some ad placements running over the next few weeks that you’re not accustomed to seeing, both on the current site before we relaunch and the new site post-relaunch.
We are aware that ads and internet browsing are at times a contentious relationship. Nobody likes ads shoved in front of them when they’re trying to read a post. And we have always tried to keep that top of mind when selecting the kinds of ads we run. But unless the site you’re visiting is subscription-based or fully subsidized, ads are what pays for what you see in front of you. Ads keep the internet free, and without them publishers like us, Dlisted, GoFugYouself, and Pajiba, and so many of our online parties would cease to exist.
I’m not writing this to make what is a passion and a privilege to sound like some kind of burden. We LOVE what we do here and want to continue to do it for as long as we can. I’m also aware that I’m in a great position of privilege being on a daytime talk show and entertainment show nightly, both of which give LaineyGossip the website greater visibility than it might have if I weren’t on TV. But we’ve always run this site as its own, independent entity and have always believed that it should be free and accessible. So I would like to make a request and echo the sentiments you may have read elsewhere, like recently from the Fug Girls.
If you currently use an ad blocker, or typically change your cookie settings on sites you visit to not allow cookies/targeting, or you block cookies by default, please consider whitelisting our site and others that you make a part of your daily read. Allowing ads, and moreover, targeted ads, helps us pay for the photos we post, the writers who write for us, the servers who host us, the staff who keep the site running, and the countless other expenses that we incur to keep LaineyGossip viable. And based on the recent developments with COVID-19 and the near immediate drop in ad rates, which we’ve been told is only the tip of the iceberg, we’re going to rely on you to let advertisers occupy the pages you visit if we are going to make it through the next several months.
If you’re not sure how to set your browser to allow ads, The Atlantic has a great guide to help you figure it out. And if you’re truly concerned about privacy implications of allowing ads and/or cookies because of work sensitivities or other reasons, we understand. We just wanted to appeal to those of you who have the option to run ads to allow us to do so. It’s critical to our survival and to sites like us that you visit.
Thank you for listening to a gossip rant about boring industry stuff (Jacek wrote most of it), and thank you SO MUCH for reading LaineyGossip. We hope you enjoy the new look and encourage you to send feedback as we expect to have some post-launch bumps as is always the case with any site launch. I love it though and I hope, when it happens, you do too.
