Our Biggest Design Update Yet!

byCarson

2.4M followers

Updated 2 years ago

Hey Everyone,

It is an exciting week here at Wealthy Affiliate as there is a lot happening within the platform with regards to updates and refreshes to some of the most widely used areas by everyone!

As you read this post you are experience our new WA Blog interface and you're hopefully noticing the many significant updates to all aspects of the experience.

I'm going to get into the full details of this in just a moment, but first I want to talk about what went into this update.

In November 2020, almost two years ago we released a major update to the WA Platform with a refreshed dashboard and brand new overall look and feel to the members area. We rolled out a huge update (our biggest at the time to date).

Over the course of 2021 we refined the initial release of the new UX, and we began building the next phase of the release which included some far more integral parts of the system. For the past 12 months we've been working diligently to improve all elements of WA, but also working on the BIG update to the most widely used areas in WA that we've released today.

Today's update affected the following main areas:

• Blogs
• Questions
• Profiles
• Comments
• Guest Experience (When not logged in)
• Blog Editor
• Dashboard
• and many other key components within the platform

With the goal of creating higher user engagement and a better experience on both desktop and mobile devices, we went to work on 100's of redesigns of elements and components. From font styles and sizes, to button layouts and colors, navigation, speed, and usability.

We've redesigned these areas from the ground up and just released our biggest release in our 17 years. 10's of thousands of programming developer hours went into this update and we now have our most widely used areas of WA on our latest technology, newest servers, and running our new codebase.

So, What Exactly has Changed?

1 - Blogs & Questions:

• Blogs are now displayed in a new design
• Increased readability
• Designed for all devices
• 500%+ Faster page load times
• Back to Dashboard feature (a favorite of mine)

As mentioned above, the blog experience has been completely overhauled. On desktop and mobile devices there is a new menu that allows for seamless movement between elements owned by a user.

For example, when viewing a blog post by Kyle, you'll see a left hand menu (desktop) or expandable menu (mobile) with links to his profile, blog roll (list of blogs), training and questions. Any page that you are on that is related to a fellow member, you'll see their profile box in the menu.

Additionally, the WA blog and Question design has come with significant performance improvements showing 500%-800% faster load times. Switching between pages in the new platform is incredibly fast on all devices. This allows for seamless switching between the WA Dashboard, Blogs, Questions, and Profiles.

There has always been an option to expand a Blog post right from the WA Dashboard, but it's good to focus on longer content by browsing directly to the actual blog page to see it in full. Plus, links from email notifications load blog post and question detail pages. This can be done from the WA Dashboard seamlessly now that we have a "Back to Dashboard" button!

This means that after you've consumed the content on the blog page, you can click "Back to Dashboard" and it'll take you right back to where you left off...even if you were 5, 10, 20 scrolls from the top. This is one of my favourite updates that makes navigating WA and consuming content far more seamless and natural. I look forward to hearing what you all think of this feature :)

2 - New Blog Editor

The new blog editor has come with some really cool new updates, and things that are really going to lead to some exciting future integrations and implementations.

Below is a look at the "Create a Post" component of the new dashboard blog creator. This has been completely redesigned from the ground up.

Some of the key updates include:

• Brand New Editor
• 1000% Faster to access
• Improved Image Management
• Works on All Devices
• What's On Your Mind Card (Dashboard/Profile)

Central to everything at Wealthy Affiliate is creating content. We've created a brand new blog editor that we are really excited about. The new blog editor can be accessed in a number of ways.

• From the WA Dashboard via our "What's on your Mind" Card
• From the Quick Action menu.

What's On Your Mind Card

Quick Action Menu

There is also a brand new interface for adding cover images, and formatting your post.

It's been fully redesigned from the ground up and creating content in WA now works beautifully on all device screen sizes!

3 - Content Categories

• Categories allow for organization and content association
• When you'll need to tag
• Future plans

When creating content at WA whether it be Classes (for our training Experts), WA Blog Posts, or Questions, central to organizing these is our new Category tagging system. We have future plans for content organization in WA and this starts with adding up to 5 categories each time you publish.

When creating a blog or question at the bottom before you publish you'll need to pick up to 5 categories. Choose categories that represent your content for the purpose of organization in future WA platform updates. Whether it's one category, or five, you choose what works best for your content.

You can type to refine the list, or browse through the list and click a category to add.

The categories are not entirely new as they have been used within the Classes platform for some time, but the ability to tag blogs and questions with these same categories is new to the blog and question publishing process here in WA!

And of course if you cannot decide on the perfect tag or if your content is about something completely different , just it with "Other"!

4 - Real-Time Comments

• Updates happen in real time
• See who's typing
• Two-way conversation capability

A brand new comment platform was released in the Classes platform recently and we've brought this same platform over to blogs, questions and profiles. Already today in the conversations that I've been part of, I've seen new comments stream into questions and blog posts and I've been able to engage with that content without leaving the page. Communication has become more efficient with this update to the comment platform and I can't wait to see how this affects how we all use WA!

5 - Member Profiles

• New Goals Section
• New Comment Area
• New Navigation Menu with links to Blog/Training/Questions

Everyone at WA has an entirely newly updated profile. From your about me section, to your images, to links to social media accounts and websites, to your network section. Members profiles are brand new from the ground up and offer us the platform that we can use to continue updating your space within WA.

Guest Experience & SEO

• Speed
• More SEO Friendly
• Focus on Joining/Creating Accounts
• Earn from your blog posts here at WA when they Rank
• Improved Mobile Experience

Another significant update has been to the Guest Experience of Wealthy Affiliate. This is the experience for those who are not logged in.

When creating content in WA, it can rank in Google, Bing, Yahoo and the other major search engines. That content can attract SEO organic traffic and create referrals for you as the publisher.

Any content that is joined through without an affiliate sharing link will attribute the joining member to the owner of the content. While this is not new to WA, it's an added benefit of blogging and asking questions!

Guest Experience of a recent Blog Post by Kyle

The new guest experience is far faster and scores well with Google PageSpeed insights, it'll rank better, and ultimately attract more people to WA through the content that you publish. It was created with a mobile first approach and works well on all screen sizes.

Sharing Content in WA with your own friends, family, or on social media is greatly improved with this update! You can expect better engagement and increased referrals though shared content WA.

The guest experience also comes with brand new login and create account designs and finally includes the option to login with Google!

There's literally so many things that we've updated in WA and its going to pave the way for many future features that we've wanted to built into the Wealthy Affiliate platform.

With any huge update like this there are going to be some hiccups - we had a hiccup when releasing this morning due to a misconfiguration on one of the servers but it was quickly patched up and our metrics point to things running extremely well!

If you're still reading I apologize for the 1500 word post, it's longer than I expected but there was a lot that needed to be mentioned.

I'm going to turn this over to you now to get your feedback on this latest platform update made today.

So, what do you think?

Chat soon,

Carson