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Industry Olds Rolling Stone redesigned its website, which went live today. Don’t really remember what the old site looked like, but it was probably more cluttered with too many links, information and menus, and a confusion of the word “blog.” 

RS’s menus don’t drop down, there’s only one vertical list of “top stories” (above the “fold”) and there are no ads above the fold. Lower down on the homepage, big, lively pictures take up the space that other sites fill with more text and, at most, there are three boxes of single articles going across. Ads don’t move much, and if they do they stay within their borders. There are no content slideshows, either.

The CJS report we covered last month found, among other things, that the eye reads vertically much smoother than it does horizontally. But the simple change that Rolling Stone made effectively was a spring cleaning.