On Feburary 7th, 2011, the entire Gawker Media style changed from a typical one you’d see on a blog to a hipper more programmed feel. The design focused on a top story and then listed out others along the side in a static bar.

Some people called it horrific, some used the word “satanic“. Well all of those negative words about Gawker’s redesign can probably be put to rest.

According to a few tweets from Gawker head honcho Nick Denton today, the network saw a lift of over 10 million monthly unique visitors from this point last year:

Yep, January’s in. 35.6m people globally: tinyurl.com/janglobal Interesting: no lift from trade shows. yfrog.com/mmg26xp

— Nick Denton (@nicknotned) February 2, 2012

For obsessive Gawker watchers and redesign doom-mongers: the 35.6m uniques in Jan 2012 is record and 55% up from last April’s nadir.

— Nick Denton (@nicknotned) February 2, 2012

It seems like the redesign didn’t scare people away after all, as you can tell by the graph that Denton includes with this tweet. With 35.6m unique visitors in January, the network just saw its best traffic ever.

So just when you think something is so radical and can’t work simply because it’s different, remember Gawker’s redesign. It actually worked.

One of the pages on Twitter most of us don’t see often is its homepage. It’s gone through a few revisions over the years ranging from a busy mashup of top tweets and popular users to a focus on interests, featuring a search box.

Twitter’s re-dedication to simplicity, which was made quite obvious during its press event and roll-out of its biggest upgrade in years, has also been integrated into its homepage.

The evolution of the Twitter homepage is as interesting as the changes on the functionality of the site itself.

In September, Twitter shared that it had 100M active users per month, but the site had over 400M monthly unique visitors. At the time, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said:

The 400 million monthly uniques number shows that people are getting value out of Twitter without logging in.

The new homepage design clearly focuses on getting people to either sign up, sign in, or go away. It features no profiles to click on, and no search box to search with. To compete with Facebook, the site needs users and not more traffic from people who just want to watch.

Here is Twitter’s homepage before today:

This version of the homepage distracted people from actually signing up, asking them to search for something before they had even used the site. The hope, we assume, was that if a user found something interesting on Twitter, they’d sign up and become engaged. That onboarding process clearly didn’t work. In fact, again we assume, it probably scared some non-Twitter savvy people away. The one before that was even worse.

As of today, the homepage has gotten a facelift:

The homepage has a very simple value proposition for new users:

Find out what’s happening, right now, with the people and organizations you care about.

As you refresh the page, the photo and the background color changes, but the message stays the same. Twitter is clearly making a very simple message as more focused on real-time communication and discovery and its homepage and new look reflects that.

If Twitter wants to make its service attractive to everyone, having a clean front yard is a good first step.

Google announced some upcoming upgrades to its Google Reader product today on its blog, here are some details:

In the next week, we’ll be making some highly requested changes to Google Reader. First, we’re going to introduce a brand new design (like many of Google’s other products) that we hope you love. Second, we’re going to bring Reader and Google+ closer together, so you can share the best of your feeds with just the right circles.

As a result of these changes, we also think it’s important to clean things up a bit. Many of Reader’s social features will soon be available via Google+, so in a week’s time we’ll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader.

Using Reader for your RSS feeds has been simple enough, but since Google+ was introduced, there has been a major disconnect between the two products. Luckily, Google hasn’t forgotten about Reader, and is making sweeping changes.

If you prefer to take your feeds elsewhere and aren’t interested in its new upgrade, Google says you can take your feeds with you and points out that “your data belongs to you, after all”.

We think the end result is better than what’s available today, and you can sign up for Google+ right now to start prepping Reader-specific circles. We recognize, however, that some of you may feel like the product is no longer for you. That’s why we will also be extending Reader’s subscription export feature to include the following items. Your data belongs to you, after all, and we want to make sure you can take it with you.

• Your subscriptions
• Your shared items
• Your friends
• Your likes
• Your starred items

Sharing news easily with your circles is what Google+ has been missing, and should be a welcomed with open arms by publishers everywhere. Copying and pasting links into Google+ or even using the +1 button on individual stories has most definitely slowed down the flow of news in streams. This will kick things up quite a bit.

Sites belonging to Nick Denton’s Gawker Media network have gradually received major facelifts over the past couple of days, introducing a new style that ensures popular articles are never buried by the constant addition of fresh content.

In regards to the redesign, many hate it, many love it, some couldn’t care less, we’re sure Denton couldn’t care. However, one thing that might concern its founder ever-so-slightly is the fact that not one piece of content published from any of his web properties in the last 24 hours has been crawled by Google News – in fact the last time anything from Lifehacker was indexed by Google News was two days ago.

The irregularity was spotted by Mark Carrey, who performed a search on Google’s news portal using the “site:gawker.com” operator. Typically, this would display a list of articles published on Gawker.com, and the user would be able to select specific date filters to view content published during a certain period:

As you can see, Google News hasn’t indexed one piece of content from Gawker.com in 24 hours, and any content that is listed was published before the new design was pushed live. Lifehacker, Gizmodo and other Gawker properties are affected also.

It begs the question; has Gawker’s makeover resulted in the network being swiftly ommitted from search results or is there something more to it?

Google News can provide a steady source of traffic to a website, particularly when a story is breaking, news items are often listed at the top of a Google Search for popular queries. Whilst the referrals might be small to a large network to Gawker, I can’t imagine Nick Denton would dismiss the portal entirely.

We have contacted Gawker and Google News representatives to clarify if this indeed an error on Gawker’s part or a glitch in the way Google News collates stories, we will update you as soon as we receive a response.

Update: We have received word from Scott Kidder, Director of Editorial Operations at Gawker Media who notes that the issue seems to be a bug in the new Gawker redesign. The issue was “discovered yesterday” and they “hope to have it resolved soon”.