We are now three weeks into our new design and this is my third blog to update you on what feedback we have had and how we are responding to it.
Within minutes of the new bmj.com launching on 8 November someone tweeted that it didn’t look great on mobile phones. How right they were. Apologies for that. It’s now looking a lot better. I hope you agree. Mobile traffic is very important to us. Last month we had almost 77,000 visits from mobiles, up from 40,812 a year earlier. As I said last week, in 2012 we’ll investigate a fully optimised version of the site for mobiles.
There was also some debate on Twitter last week about pdf versions of articles. In June this year we provided pdfs of all articles (previously it was just research). Before that we only provided pdf of the print section in which that article appeared.
The article page is not currently displaying the print section pdf. At first we thought it was only internal colleagues who valued this facility (knowing what print issue an article requiring a correction appeared in, for example, or sending a journalist the section in which his/her feature appeared in print), but we’ve since learned that lots of you value this too. You can still get the print section pdf from the print table of contents. We hope to find a fix soon so it’s displaying on articles again.
We were also alerted to a problem printing our new Easy Read format in Internet Explorer and Firefox. This is again on the list to be fixed, and it should be soon.
Some BMA members contacted us to say they had problems logging in. This has now been resolved.
Our technical partners at HighWire Press in Stanford, California, are currently working hard to resolve an issue with alerts. In a nutshell, you cannot currently sign up for an alert if a response or correction is posted, and if the article is cited.
Please keep your feedback coming at bmjredesign@bmj.com
You can access other blogs about the redesign from this link. I also wrote a blog last week about our new publishing platform. There is also a video guide to the site, our launch podcast, our FAQs, and the editorial to mark its arrival.
David Payne is editor, bmj.com