Phase One of the Ningin redesign. Please enjoy the new Community Page!

Ningin doesn’t have a home page per se like most websites. Rather an equivalent that we call the Community Page which takes a snapshot of all the different things happening within Ningin at a given time. It was natural for us to start with this section first. The goal of this redesign was to introduce a cleaner layout and more intuitive navigation. I hope you can agree that we made a big step towards accomplishing that goal.

You might have to refresh your browser by pressing F5 for everything to work properly.

As mentioned before, a new design was only part of the new Ningin. There are many more features and functionally in the pipeline. This phase of the upgrades not only changes the Community Page, but adds the foundations for those new features which will be added in later as they are developed and tested. Every one of our current applications, Forums, Blogs, Social News, and Profiles, will receive major upgrades in features and functionality. When this upgrade is all said and done, we will be at Ningin 2.0 =)

We are no longer supporting Internet Explorer 6.

Even though this was a somewhat difficult decision to make, I am so happy to have made it. IE6 is one of the banes of my life. To be clear, you can still use IE6 for many areas of Ningin and you can always read our blogs or discuss in our forums, but some of the more visually appealing areas, especially in the profile section, won’t always work.

Countless hours are wasted by me and my development team trying to make this browser work for all the areas of our site. The new design that Ningin is using has a handful of features that IE6 just cannot support even with the myriad of known hacks and scripts out there. So it was either get rid of those new features or not support IE6. With the number of Ningin users on IE6 at less than 7% over the last three months, the tipping point was reached and we finally can end the tyranny that IE6 has put my development staff through. We’re not alone in this decision as Facebook, 37 Signals, Apple, made official announcements to end their support. Many other “Web 2.0” also made this decision without an official announcement. If you’re bored just go to some of them with IE6 and see how inferior the surfing experience is as compared with standards compliant browsers. Again, it’s not so much by choice for them. There are many new things that IE6, a browser built in 2001, just cannot do.

Users of IE6 can easily upgrade to IE7 if the preference is to stick with Microsoft. Or join over 50% of Ningin users on Firefox, a stat that brings a twinkle to my eye. There’s also Opera, Safari, Flock, and many others. Naturally, my recommendation is Firefox.

So what are you thoughts so far?