Don’t be alarmed. Yes, this place looks very different today. That’s because after almost a decade online, we’re thrilled to reveal the next generation model of thedrive.com, our all-new, first-ever complete redesign of your friendly neighborhood car site. Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.
First, I want to acknowledge that some of you reading this are probably annoyed. Change on this scale is always an adjustment, and as imperfect as our old site was, we were all used to it. It worked, for the most part. Functional and enduring, like a Ford Econoline. But this, this is a big shift—and as a reader, I usually don’t like it when radical change comes to my favorite places on the internet.
That said, we’ve spent months working on a totally new look bringing us into this decade, and I think you’ll see why it’s such a huge improvement. First, I want to shout out our new homepage, which has been completely blown apart and rebuilt around the thing you love most: a simple, reverse-chronological feed of stories. No more grid of boxes. We want thedrive.com to be a place where it’s super easy to scan today’s posts, catch up on what you’ve missed, and find our latest must-read story.
You can see that our article design has been rethought, everything from the headline treatment to the font to the position on your screen. We also have a separate new design for our car reviews and features, with bigger photo treatments and other neat enhancements. Our homepage and stories are where 90% of people spend all their time, but if you step beyond those, you’ll find new and improved topic pages, product review pages, a better search function, and a lot more.
Under the hood, we’ve moved the site to a brand new platform, one that’ll be easier to change, fix, and continually improve from here. It should load faster, scroll smoother, and generally feel better to use.
Now, I want to stress that with a project of this scope, there are bound to be some bugs today. Some things still need to be dialed in. You will see things that aren’t perfect. But I also want to stress that this is absolutely not the finish line for us. We have a big old list of tweaks and upgrades we’ll be working through in the coming days and weeks.
In the meantime, please let us know what you like, what you hate, and what you want to see from here. Hop in the comments or email feedback@thedrive.com. I promise we’ll read every single response, because ultimately, we’re doing this for you. That’s really the sea change here—our old site was born out of necessity. Time Inc needed to build a website when it bought the YouTube channel, so it cobbled one together. It wasn’t done with an audience in mind, because there was no audience yet.
Almost a decade later, there’s a pretty damn big audience, and this new site is born out of our mission to serve you. Out of love for the little corner of the internet we’ve built together. And out of the vision that this chronicle of car culture should have another decade of success.
Let’s do this.