Mininova Launches New Site Design

Written by Smaran on December 21, 2006 

One of most popular BitTorrent sites, mininova just got a complete overhaul. They’ve launched a new site design, and relocated to a new host and datacenter.

The site had become so popular that it became unbearably slow to navigate. People can now stop complaining. If you visit the site, you’ll notice it’s now blazing fast, amazingly so.

Mininova has been beta testing a previous version of this design for a almost a year now, so it’s nice to finally see it go live.

In October, we reported that the beta version of the redesign wasn’t fully functional. In particular, the advanced search seemed to be having some problems. This has since been fixed. Apparently, the entire search backend of the site has been rewritten, and now searches will be better and faster.

According to the mininova blog, with the new version, some extra functionality has been added, and existing features have been made easier to use. A “Jump to Category” option now lets you jump directly to different sections of the site.

Mininova founder Niek told us that there could still be some small problems, such as 500 errors, but these will be straightened out as soon as possible. They will add some extra memory modules this Saturday, and the site should be running smoothly by then.

We think that the new layout is a lot easier to understand and navigate, but some say it lacks the sleekness of the previous design. What is your opinion of the new design? Is it better than the previous one?

mininova redesign

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11 Responses

1 Dec 21, 2006 at 19:33 by Rosano

It looks pretty much the same.

2 Dec 21, 2006 at 19:36 by Smaran

@ Rosano: The colours are different, the RSS icons are larger and more prominently placed, some of the fonts are larger and the menubars are bulkier.

3 Dec 22, 2006 at 00:22 by Italia

It looks awfull, 20 somewhat colors on the index page just hurts my eyes. I dont like it 1 bit

4 Dec 22, 2006 at 04:09 by Bob

Italia, I think you are just retarded if you think thats 20 colors well look again because to me the colors are very similar and don’t mess with my eyes at all maybe you just dint know it but have down syndrome and ur eye balls are retarded.

5 Dec 23, 2006 at 00:31 by sodium1

i was really cheesed off with the slow loading of pages, it used to be fast until it became popular….this re-designed site is wicked..just how i can remember it…well done neik…..

6 Dec 23, 2006 at 00:37 by bob

They still have annoying adverts - i mean c’mon, how many of us actually click them?? :P

7 Dec 23, 2006 at 10:39 by elmo121

still looks like a clone of x-tore coded by the boys at meganova.org

8 Dec 23, 2006 at 21:56 by RC

I’ve always liked the way that they index/catalog their torrents, but when it became popular, the site was so slow that it was nearly useless. Glad to see that it has sped up a bit.

9 Dec 24, 2006 at 08:26 by Sled

It change….OK…Good. Response time ? Not yet change.
I don’t care if they change their look or whatever, i’d like their response time change too. BTW, it’s a nice index though.

10 Dec 27, 2006 at 08:12 by liked the old mininova better

500 - Internal Server Error

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