<commit_before>---
layout: post
title: College Confidential's costly theme
comments: yes
tags: design
---

To preface: [I joined College
Confidential](https://localhost:4000/2020/01/17/leaving_stack.html) in
January. The company I work for took over management of the site in
December and [implemented a new registration
system](https://talk.collegeconfidential.com/community-forum-issues/2166064-upcoming-changes-to-the-way-we-log-in.html)
to begin integrating with our other products. Last April the previous
owner of the site [implemented a new
theme](https://talk.collegeconfidential.com/community-forum-issues/2078728-college-confidential-relaunch.html). The
new theme has had a lot of benefits. Chief among them: the site now
works on phones. But I believe the cost of the changes in terms of
usability has been high. The good news is [we can fix
it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8YWZm_YKoo).


## Background

Using the Wayback Machine, we can see [what the site looked like last
year](https://web.archive.org/web/20190331054642/https://talk.collegeconfidential.com/categories):

![Screenshot of College Confidential in March of 2019](/images/CC-orig.png)<commit_msg>Dumb broken link is my fault.<commit_after>---
layout: post
title: College Confidential's costly theme
comments: yes
tags: design
---

To preface: [I joined College
Confidential](/2020/01/17/leaving_stack.html) in January. The company
I work for took over management of the site in December and
[implemented a new registration
system](https://talk.collegeconfidential.com/community-forum-issues/2166064-upcoming-changes-to-the-way-we-log-in.html)
to begin integrating with our other products. Last April the previous
owner of the site [implemented a new
theme](https://talk.collegeconfidential.com/community-forum-issues/2078728-college-confidential-relaunch.html). The
new theme has had a lot of benefits. Chief among them: the site now
works on phones. But I believe the cost of the changes in terms of
usability has been high. The good news is [we can fix
it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8YWZm_YKoo).


## Background

Using the Wayback Machine, we can see [what the site looked like last
year](https://web.archive.org/web/20190331054642/https://talk.collegeconfidential.com/categories):

![Screenshot of College Confidential in March of 2019](/images/CC-orig.png)
{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.09923339011925042, 'fraction_numerical': 0.036626916524701875, 'mean_word_length': 4.85785536159601, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 3, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 3, 'https://': 11, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 2, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
{'dir': 'git-commits-cleaned', 'id': '6486632', 'n_tokens_mistral': 767, 'n_tokens_neox': 692, 'n_words': 248}