Welcome to VentureBeat’s new design

I’m delighted to announce VentureBeat’s new design.

It’s meant to cater to the differing interests of our readers. For example, we’ve ramped up our coverage of games over the past year, and we see a distinct group of readers interested in games coverage. So we’ve created GamesBeat, for those want to read only games-related stories. Separately, we’ve moved to a better server architecture, which should mitigate downtime and speed up the site.

Here’s more about the new site layout:

VentureBeat — This continues to be the parent site, and will carry the “river” of stories we write each day, with only a few exceptions. For example, we may choose to run certain games editorial and other features on our sub-property, GamesBeat, and not publish it in the VentureBeat river because we believe it is too far removed from the interests of our core readership on VentureBeat.

We also have distinct properties for each of our areas of specialization, as follows:

GamesBeat — This property will feature only our games-related coverage;

DigitalBeat — This property will feature only our digital media related content. This will include coverage of everything from the iPhone and other mobile innovation to social networking, advertising, video and music content;

GreenBeat — This property will feature our clean-tech coverage;

Deals & More — This property will feature all our coverage of deal flow (stories about venture capital investments into companies), as well as stories that don’t fit neatly into the other properties listed above. This is the “More” part of Deal & More, and includes things like enterprise software. Mobile content may also be also appear here, too, for example if we write about a personal finance or productivity iPhone app.

In some cases, stories may be published at several of the sub-blogs. For example, a mobile application company featuring a new interactive game which just raised venture capital will be featured on VentureBeat, GamesBeat, DigitalBeat and Deals & More.

We’ll start here, and will consider creating other properties as appropriate (we’re mulling sites such as “MobileBeat” or “Enterprise Software Beat,” for example; feedback welcome).

Most of the other changes will be self-explanatory. We’re giving a slightly different treatment to “wire” stories, those one-liner links to venture capital funding deals that we haven’t felt merited full space on the front-page. As of today, the most recent wire stories will be placed further down (to the right of the first-ad unit as you scroll down the center of the page).

Importantly, a big shoutout for Martin Ringlein and his team at the Web design agency Nclud. They did an amazing job of designing and implementing this in a mere 10 days, after months of work with another team didn’t go anywhere.

The site isn’t perfect. We’ve identified some some imperfections, which we’ll be working on over the coming days. We also welcome your feedback, either to editor at venturebeat dot com, or in comments. We’ll implement other updates based on that.

Finally, we’re looking for a developer/product manager to help us build out the site with lots of other cool features. Please get in touch if you’re interested. Thanks for reading!