The last time we launched a major update to YLF was September 2010. Since then we have added many features and made many incremental improvements to the user experience, but the basic design has been constant. That will soon change when we launch the next major version of YLF. 

Although Angie, Inge and I are the ones working behind the scenes, we’re very conscious that YLF readers and members share the site with us. A lot of you spend significant time here, so it seemed wrong to launch a big change with no warning or advance explanation of what led us to change things. With that in mind, here’s a quick rundown of our high-level goals. 

First, we want to simplify and clarify. If you are new to YLF we want you to immediately know what we’re all about: What to wear, and how to wear it. There is a lot on the site, but we want the most important things to stand out. 

Second, whether you are new to YLF or a longtime reader, we want to make it easier and more fun for you to browse and consume the content on YLF. That means nicer presentation of recent YLF features, but also great ways to browse more than 2500 posts in our archives. We put a lot of effort into the visuals on YLF, whether it’s our own photography or collages of products that we use to illustrate Angie’s posts, and we want better ways to showcase them. 

Third, we need to help YLF members deal with the ever increasing scale of the community. There was a time when the front page of the forum could show a few days’ worth of forum threads. These days the time elapsed between the first and last posts on the front page is often measured in minutes. Whether you visit hourly, daily or weekly, we want the forum to be manageable and fun. 

Our plan is to launch the redesign early on Sunday morning, so in a few days you will be able to see how we did. If past YLF launches are anything to go by, we will get some great input from the community. Some of that input will get added to the big list of things we do in the future, but some of it will probably lead to changes that we make in the days following the launch.

Thank you so much for your participation in YLF. We’re super excited to get started on this next part of our journey together. Too excited, in fact, to keep it completely under wraps any longer. So here are some snippets of the new design.