Engadget: now faster, with better galleries, and fully ready for CES

We’ve been working extra hours over past few weeks making a number of enhancements to Engadget, both up front and behind the curtains. We’ve got three awesome bits for you:

• CES-optimized news page (ces.engadget.com). When you’re publishing as much as CES demands, you need to be able to zoom out a bit for ease of use. Many will recognize this from CES 2007, but we’ve made a few improvements (like a video content grid, better easier gallery access, and so on); we will have a default page-version selector soon, so watch out for that.
• New galleries! You asked for it, you got it. We aren’t by any means finished improving the design and usability of our galleries (in fact, we’ll be further tweaking them over the next couple of days), but for now the images should at least be easier to browse and select, and faster to load. If you’ve got further input, let us know..
• Further speed improvements. We know, Engadget has been sucking lately in terms of load-speed. A lot of this has to do with the way our ads are loaded, but we made a few tweaks to our setup and code that has the site jumping faster than ever — even despite the ridiculous amount of media we serve with every page. Go nuts on F5, the bandwidth is on us.

Engadget extends its highest of fives to our dedicated design team: Matt, Mark, and Erik! Here, check out their handiwork in those galleries.