This New Site

Follow the links for a tour

3 min read

Image of various parts of the IEEE Spectrum website.
IEEE Spectrum

For visitors familiar with our old site, welcome to our latest incarnation, which makes it easy to go deep into a topic like machine learning, get a tutorial on the topological materials that could disrupt the semiconductor industry (when will the chip shortage end, anyway?), or scour the latest edition of Top Programming Languages (coming in August), for an emerging language poised to upend your corner of the tech sector.

If you're reading this in the physical pages of IEEE Spectrum, there's a good chance you don't visit our website much, if ever.

We get it. Up to now, there hasn't been a particular reason to visit if you're satisfied dipping into the pages of Spectrum on a monthly basis.

So with the generous support of the IEEE New Initiatives Committee, we've designed an experience around IEEE members both current and future. We're running on one of the Web's fastest platforms, RebelMouse, to deliver beautifully textured screens studded with stunning photography and engrossing infographics to surround our award-winning journalism and columnists like Rodney Brooks, Vaclav Smil, and Allison Marsh. For this new site design we were fortunate to work with the artists at Pentagram, who were also responsible for the recent redesign of our print edition.


Once you're signed in as a member (see upper right corner), the real fun begins. First, you'll see that clicking on your name in the upper right-hand corner brings up a link to your personal profile page. Here you can choose an avatar that will appear at the top of the page along with your membership grade, status, and other details. That same avatar will appear next to comments you make on articles throughout the site. Your comments will instantly appear when you post them—no more premoderation for members---but please look at our commenting policy, which aims to foster civil discourse on some of the most daunting challenges facing our planet. Once you start commenting, you can track activity in threads you're involved in right from your profile page.

See something of interest, but can't read it right away? Save that article to read later by clicking on the bookmark at the top of the post and a link to it will appear on your profile. You can manage your Spectrum newsletter subscriptions from the same page. You can also create a feed of the latest posts related to the topics you're most interested in.

In the mood to check out the latest print issue of Spectrum but the mail is slow or you're a digital subscriber? Download a replica PDF directly from your profile page. Did someone refer you to an article Elon Musk wrote for us back in 2009? As a member, you have access to Spectrum and The Institute's print archives going back to 2000.

And there's more for you here than just your profile page and thousands of stories: We have a new podcast (Fixing the Future, hosted by Contributing Editor Steven Cherry) and webinars and white papers that go deep on our sponsors' engineering tools. We're also starting something we call Spectrum Collections, curated bundles of our articles on specific topics that showcase our most popular Hands On DIY projects, say, or a menagerie of the world's most influential CPUs.

Spectrum's best stories have at their heart people coming together to solve hard problems. And exactly that has been happening here at Spectrum over the last year, as an indefatigable team led by me; Erico Guizzo, Digital Product Manager; and Preeti Kulkarni, Spectrum Online & Web Application Development Manager tackled digital media's hard problems in partnership with our colleagues at Pentagram, RebelMouse, Interface Guru, and IEEE IT. Enjoy the fruits of our efforts.

After you've had some time to experience this new site, we'd love to know what you think. Please log in and share your thoughts with us, including what you'd like to see in the future, in the comment section below. For fun, finish the sentence "This new site is..."

The Conversation (11)
Donald Ingram
Donald Ingram30 Jul, 2021
M

That's nice, now how do we get back to the original layout, which in my opinion, was not only not broken but a far more efficient means of browsing current news.

1 Reply