Yes, there's a brand new TSN.ca in town. This morning at 9:00am ET, TSN.ca relaunched with a brand new face. While not a full “relaunch” per-se, it was a reload of the new home page, and a little bit of a change on the back end. Gone are nested tables within tables within tables within tables. In is CSS and stylin' table-free design.

The new front page is about 1/2 the weight of the old page, loads twice as fast as the old page, and contains 40% more information thanks to the new “4th bar” which will be great for the 85% of our users who are at 1024×768.

By the numbers:
Lines of code in the old front page: 1014
Lines of code in the new page: 513
# of characters in the old page: 58,121
# of characters in the new page: 35,063
# of tables on the old front page: a buttload
# of tables on the new front page: 1 (for the masthead/banner combination, someday I'll figure out how to eliminate that one too).

The new front page uses SIFR, which I love, and a lot of really sweet CSS tricks to get the work done. I've had to drop out some support for IE 5.0 users, but hey, when you're using a 5 year old browser, you're probably used to not seeing all the cool stuff. Netscape 4.7 users are totally out of luck. Sorry friends.

So far the response has been mixed. The response in the building is “Nice site, love it.” The response from users is “We fear change, go back to the old look” (which is what people said about the last relaunch), and the response from the jerks is “Way to sell out TSN, you look just like ESPN now.

Now's a great chance to use my comments. Got something you love or hate about the new design? Let me know.

***UPDATED June 23rd***

24 hours after the launch and we're still tweaking things, getting rid of little errors, and modifying stuff. We've tweaked the fonts, set a base font of 12pt (which I hate the fact we had to do it), and cut our size in half. The actual HTML page was tiny, but all the images etc it was caching were HUGE!

There are still a bunch of validation errors, but it's coming along.

We're also starting to get some notice for the site changes. Today Dave Shea's Mezzoblue gave us a shout out which is pretty cool. Zen Garden has been inspirational for me, and he's helped to revitalize my love of the web. Thanks Dave!

Update: Comments have been closed on this story thanks to the comment spammers out there.