We’ve been diligently working behind the scenes and are thrilled to be able to introduce our new blog to you. As you can see, a lot has changed. The most obvious difference is that we’ve combined the Sony Electronics Community site, VAIO Community site and the Sony Style blog into one place.
Since January, we’ve been working hard coding, designing, merging and all that jazz in order to bring our readers a better unified experience. This blog is focused around all things Sony including news, products, events and customer stories. And that’s just an example.
Our new design now lets us feature more at the top of the page for first time readers and introduces our long time loyalists to new Sony offsite destinations (like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube). In addition to posting our own stuff, we’re hoping to feature more of our users by giving props to the hundreds of test videos, unboxings, amazing photos, and other cool Sony-related things we uncover across the net.
Our development team busted behind to build modules you can’t find on any other blog out there. At the same time, we’re not out there to reinvent the wheel. Our goal was to better organize our content to make it easier for you to discover the Sony stuff you enjoy most. There are dozens of new elements to the site but here’s a little tour of the main features we’ve added in.
By the way…we are still working out the kinks of our new blog so we beg for your forgiveness in advance and ask for your patience as we iron out any issues.
New Design
After a few revisions and a couple of late night,s we arrived at a design that we feel strikes an optimal balance between the spirit and sophistication of the Sony brand , in combination with a fantastic and personable blogging experience.
When approaching the design for the new blog, we began the process by considering multiple variations of layout and content organization. The design process focused on creating large areas devoted to showcasing imagery, slideshows and other types of media (like video), while even pulling in content from outside sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter.
We felt like these elements would provide our readers with a more impactful and richer reading experience. Legibility was also a key focus of our design, so in addition to providing generous amounts of whitespace in content heavy areas, we also increased font sizes for easy and enjoyable reading. Another core element of the design system includes a modular right navigation bar – a persistent element on the site that not only provides easy access to a variety of content types but also allows us to effectively surface current topics you might be interested in. Visually, the design of the navigation bar is contrasted against the lighter pages, helping to separate the two areas and allow folks to focus on either reading or navigating without confusing the two.
New Features
Our monumental change is the fact that the Sony Electronics, Sony VAIO and Sony Style communities/blogs are now one but we’ve also added some other fancy features.
- More Ways to Comment: We realized that we had a lot of guest comments on our previous blogs and so we wanted to make it easier for people to post a comment. Now can sign in using your Facebook along with guest commenting. This portion is still under construction as we’re working hard to add Twitter and Sony Style log in options. These are coming soon!
- New Video and Photo Area: While our old blogs had some areas to feature photos and video, the majority of the media were items we posted ourselves. This new section not only displays our own photos & videos from our YouTube and Flickr pages but it also is a place for use to feature cool photos and video we find out there relating to Sony products. This might just be your 15 minutes of fame (although I would personally argue that winning millions in the lotto would be a much better 15 minutes).
- New Twitter Stream Page: From what’s happening at the latest trade show to new products now on sale to exclusive coupons, our new Twitter page pulls in tweets from the @SonyElectronics & @SonyOutletUSA pages. If you’re not a follower of these pages, you can always see what’s happening here.
- Cool New Side Nav with Widgets: To help make it easier for you to find posts you’re interested in, we’ve reorganized our topics a tad. Now you can locate info on new products, events and even learn a tip or two. Additionally our developers coded a kickin archive app that lets you easily view our historical articles at a glance before diving in.
Now these are just a few of what we’ve added and the beauty of this blog is that we’re building this for you. If there are things you’d like to see tell us. We want to know your feedback. Thanks to all our readers across our old blogs and we look forward to introducing you to all the editors. Welcome to the new Sony blog and we hope you enjoy.
