On September 1 we relaunched The Loop with one of the biggest design changes in the site’s two-year history. Overall, the reception to the new design has been great, but there have been a few small issues that needed to be addressed.

The most important issue that readers provided was that the linked posts — those that the headline links out to another site — were not clearly marked. Because of this, it was difficult for users to know how to navigate the site.

That’s the first thing we tackled and here’s what we did:

1. The headlines that are linked posts are now underlined.

2. Headlines that are linked posts are now a smaller font size than posts that are full stories.

3. Linked posts will now have the infinity symbol after the post, clearly indicating that it is a linked post. The headline will link off to the other site and the infinity symbol will link to the permalink of the story.

These changes also carry through to the mobile site and the RSS feed.

Linked posts in the RSS feed will have an infinity symbol after the post that will take you to The Loop, while the headline will take you to the originating Web site.

The mobile site for the iPhone and iPad look, and act, exactly the same as the desktop site, so the user experience will be same no matter what device you use.

I have to take a minute and thank YJ Soon and his great DFLL plug-in for WordPress. I contacted YJ a couple of weeks ago about what I wanted to do with the linked posts and he coded everything that needed to be done.

Just a superb job on his part getting everything to work properly.