That’s true! It’s does! Good catch, you.
Evil Beet hasn’t had a facelift in about three years, and that’s already twice what Joan Rivers would tolerate, so we decided to snazz it up a bit. I put together a brief FAQ for you guys to minimize freakout.
Q: I hate it.
A: I know you do.
Q: I’m personally offended by these changes. You’ve really crossed the line this time, Beet. I’m never coming back.
A: Thank you for sharing.
Q: You are such a famewhore. You’re fat and you try too hard. Also, I hate the new site.
A: OK. Let’s address that last part. If there’s something specific you don’t like about the new site, or something that doesn’t work correctly, and you want to talk about it to someone who has any say at all in whether it changes (read: me), you should leave it angrily in the comments of every post email me directly, in all caps, having carefully selected the perfect emoticons to convey your anger press the big blue button on the side that says “Feedback” and leave your suggestion or rant.
Q: Something about the new site is broken.
A: See the response above.
Q: Why did you change from Disqus commenting back to WordPress commenting?
A: We’re having some issues integrating Disqus into the new design. Also, Disqus seemed to allow in more spam than WordPress comments. But it also had a lot of great features that I liked and that you guys used. If you have opinions on whether you’d like to go back to Disqus comments, please click the Feedback badge on the side and let me know. We will continue to work on integrating Disqus with the new theme if it’s a priority for you guys. Comment threading will be all screwy for the comments that were created when we were using Disqus. For that, I apologize. I am working on it.
Q: Why did you change this site and not Zelda Lily? Is it because you hate Zelda Lily? Is that because you hate women? Why do you always pretend to be a feminist when you don’t parrot any of the traditional, outdated feminist ideology? I hate you.
A: The same design changes will be rolled out to Zelda Lily later this week with help from its very talented managing editor, Sarah Spangenberg, and the harem of phenomenal writers she’s amassed, and it’s gonna blow y’all’s fuckin’ minds.
Q: Rather than complain, I would like to use the new site as it was intended. How might this be possible?
A. Oh dear. I wasn’t expecting that. Let me think. Well, we’ve made it really easy for you to “Like” a story using your Facebook account. If you want to go one step further, and share the story on your Facebook page or on your Twitter account or by email, the call-out buttons that follow a story make it really, really easy to do that. (If you run into problems trying to do that, please mention it to me using the Feedback badge.) The Featured stories along the top and side of the site make it easier for you to scan quickly the biggest stories of the past couple of days and decide which ones you want to read. We hope that this leads to an all-around cooler and more social experience for the reader. I wanted to offer the readership a lot of the advantages of a large website while staying true to our roots as a blog. I like being a blog and I want us to stay a blog.
Q: Who did all this awesome work?
A: The logo is the same Evil Beet logo we’ve been using since forever. It was designed by my friend and former roommate Anna Knoell, who is an absolute genius as a graphic designer, and I would tell you all to hire her, except she got way too important for graphic design and is currently on a full ride to study architecture at Princeton, where she was one of the 0.05% of applicants accepted. (All together now: “Congratulations, Anna! You are smarter than all of us put together!”) Despite how phenomenally important she is becoming, when I emailed her, panicked, like, “Anna! Remember that girl in the bikini that you drew for me three years ago?? I need the vector file. Do you still have it?”, she was like “Yes, it’s right here” and sent it over. When Anna was my roommate, I made fun of her (I may have rolled around on the ground laughing for awhile to drive my point home) when she organized her book shelf by color, and sat there for hours with her best friend, mulling over which book cover had the more appropriate shade of blue to put further left. Today, I retract any statements made during that time. Thank you, Anna, for being both a design genius and totally OCD about organizing everything.
The layout was designed by a very talented woman who happens to be my cousin. No, this is not the same cousin who won the Hemingway Award for her debut novel this year. It’s another one who’s also a genius. My cousin Lori has done graphic design for over twenty years, and she’s a master of designing websites. Need help with yours? Contact her or check out her portfolio at CreativeHarvest.com.
I’d like to say it was coded by me, but it was not, because I’m too busy and old and stupid to tinker around with code all night these days. It was done by an awesome guy named Alex who stays off the radar but works quickly and inexpensively. If you have a WP project you’d like coded, drop me a line with the project details and I’ll pass them along to him to see if he’s interested. Highly recommended.
Q: You guys have photos now!
A: We do. And what’s extra cool is that you can click on those author photos to read only articles written by that author. So if you only feel like reading what Emily wrote this week, you can do that. Just click on the photo next to one of her articles.
Q: Is there anything else you want to tell us?
A: Oh, yes, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or even subscribe to our newsletter that doesn’t exist yet (more deets on that here).
All in all, I really hope you guys like the new design, and I’m open to hearing well-intended, useful criticism in terms of what we can do make it even better.
I love you.
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