Do you find it absolutely annoying when your favorite website, blog, or social media application, suddenly gets a complete face-lift in an attempt, as per stated by the people who run the said sites, to make them more user friendly, more aesthetically pleasing, or a bit more professional? I know I do. I hate it; I hate it with every fiber of my being, especially when the "newest" update just plain out ruins site, or application, making my experience with it much more frustrating than it needs to be. It is evident that it happens more often than not; take a look at Tumblr: we have probably all heard about, or experienced, the multiple face-lifts done by the staff, which either made using the site, or application, impossible. However, this article is not about Tumblr, rather, it is centered upon this wondrous website, Odyssey.

Let us start at the beginning. Originally, when anyone, writer or reader, visited Odyssey, they began on a page that looked similar to the one below:

You would be greeted by the Odyssey logo, a search bar, four miscellaneous articles that would change every few seconds, and a simple area at the bottom, showing where writers, like me, would log in, a link to be able to join a writing team, and a few other useful links. I loved the set up, it was simple, it was easy to navigate, and it was easy on my eyes. Moving forward, if you were a writer, you would click the admin link, as stated before, and you would appear on a page similar to this:

There is not much to say about this page, except that it was and is, again, simple and easy on the eyes. Thankfully, these two pages are still pretty much unchanged; after the beta site release, however, they were incredibly difficult to find, so much so that I wholeheartedly believed that they scrapped them completely. No, I was wrong, they are still there, but I must iterate this: they were near impossible to find.

The launch of the beta site was unknown to me until I was sent an email by Odyssey staff, describing the new layout and to give feedback on what we think about the new, at the time possible, website design. I was curious and decided, since I had just gotten out of class for the day, to check out the new design. Needless to say, my jaw dropped, and not from awe.

Let me go down the list of issues I have with this redesign. First off, the amount of empty space on this page, the two sides of the articles that are gray, is excessive; it is a waste, a space that could have been filled by the articles and possibly other content, yet they chose to cram everything into the center. The aesthetics are just unappealing and a bit distracting. Second, (and this part nearly made me flip my desk), in order for writers to log in, they have to play a game of hide-and-seek. The login link is no longer titled "admin," it has been put under a category titled "Muse."

Okay, I admit, it does not really seem that maddening. After all, the writing dashboard is Muse, but for someone like me, who is somewhat new to the system, or someone who may not pay attention to something like that, it took me way longer to find it than it should have. Something else you will notice is giant "Login with Facebook" button, which, I'm assuming, uses your Facebook as a login profile. Well, I tried this out a few times and, and every time I do, I get directed to this screen:

Alright, well, thank you for telling me my hair looks great, but I have to say it does not make up for this useless button, which has yet to even be fixed by the programmers, or just taken off, since it seriously serves no purpose.

I was outraged, fed up with this insanity, so, thankfully, I decided to leave a bit of "helpful" feedback to the staff, letting them know what I thought of the new update. Well, it must have not gone through, and I'm pretty sure I am not the only one who had some complaining to shell out, the feedback button was removed about a week later and, so far as I know, we are stuck with this horrible new website.

In my closing, I want to take a few moments to address Odyssey's IT staff:

Do you not care what we, the writers, have to say on important issues like this?

Do our opinions not matter to you at all?

We just want to be able to do what we love to do, write articles and push our works out into the public, as easily and as pain free as possible, yet you seem to have some other ideas and plans in store for us. Just, please, for our sake, bring back the old layout, or at least fix these numerous problems that exist in the beta version.