If you are a repeat visitor of Carbon Fiber Gear, you’ll notice that today we’ve launched our new homepage design. A lot has changed with this new design, and we have plans to make a few minor adjustments/additions to what you currently see.  On top of that, we’re thinking about rolling out a similar look accross the site, not just the homepage.

We had a few priorities in mind when working on this new design:

• We wanted it to look less like a blog.  While an important part of the site is the blog, we have a lot more to offer, and we wanted to make sure you all knew about it.
• We wanted it to look cleaner and load faster.  We definitely feel that the new look is much cleaner, and it surely loads faster.  Instead of having 10 blog posts full of content, we now have 5 headlines, some with a post image.  Not having the images from the last 10 posts on the homepage alone makes things load much faster and makes the site more lean.
• We wanted search to be more visible/apparent.  On the old design the search box was located far down on the sidebar.  Now it’s very prominent and very easy to find.
• We wanted to better promote eCFG and CFG Direct.  For those that don’t know, eCFG is a real time database of carbon fiber products on eBay.  You can simply head over there and find everything carbon fiber on eBay.  CFG Direct is our retail store where we directly sell an ever-growing variety of carbon fiber products.  You’ll now see the eCFG and CFG Direct logos as well as explanations of what they are, on top of a random selection of three featured products from our CFG Direct store right at the top of the page.
• We wanted to promote our Carbon Fiber Gear Flickr Group.  Now at the bottom of the latest posts you’ll find a link to our Flickr group, as well as a stream of some of the newest photos.  Got any carbon fiber related photos/video?  Make sure to join our group and add them in.  You can’t be a true carbon fiber enthusiast without doing so 🙂
• We wanted to better promote older content in our blog.  Let’s face it, some of the stuff we’ve covered is really cool!  We want you guys and our future readers to be able find some of that cool old stuff.  We’ve created a large featured post on the top of the page to promote an article from the past.  This randomly rotates through a few featured posts, so re-load the page and you should see something new…plus it just looks really nice!  We’ve also added the blog categories and a tag cloud at the bottom of the page for you all to mess around with.  We plan on expanding on this goal a little further in the near future.

So there you have it, the new Carbon Fiber Gear homepage!  Let us know what you think, and if you have feedback, we’re all ears.  Our goal is to create the best carbon fiber enthusiast community on the internet…we’re well on the way.  If you think we should roll out this new and improved look through the site, let us know.