Please excuse us while we change in front of you – the new Time+Tide website is (finally) emerging

Andrew McUtchen

It’s ok, we can admit it. The Time+Tide website has stayed the same for a very long time. While other sites have experienced a consistent series of – usually very good and worthwhile – updates and adaptations, we have opted for a different approach.

In terms of our website design, we have partied like it’s 2014, for seven years. That’s not to say we’ve been lazy. There have been magazines, merchandise, videos, a club and occasionally even watches. In December, we will release a coffee table book.

No, laziness has not been the issue. In some kind of deranged ‘Hare & the Tortoise’ parable come to life, we have had enough people say they like our “old school”, newspaper masthead, rolling feed website so much, that we thought – like Clubhouse with voice, records with music, and wide-legged pants on Harry Styles – maybe we’d stuck at our guns long enough to cycle back to acceptability?

But last year, in the lost year, in the depths of a lot of unwanted quiet time, we all looked each other in the eye, and we knew it was time. Time to bid farewell to one of the longest generation one websites of the 2010s. We had run out of excuses to stay the same, it was time to take a deep breath and change in front of you.

So, what exactly is changing, aside from the sexy new ‘dark view’ look?

We are changing tagline – from ‘The Australian Watch Authority’ to ‘The Home of Watch Culture’

When we started out, it was important to have some kind of claim to fame. In the mid-2010s ours was that we were the most popular website in Australia about watches. It helped that there weren’t many / any websites in Australia about watches at the time, but let’s not dwell. Needless to say, this is less of a focus now.

I’m proud to have been part of pushing along watch culture in our home country. But with a team lineup that is defiantly more cosmopolitan each year, with regional editors in the US and Europe, and with an international audience that has long outgrown our Australian demographic base, it’s not really summing up who we are and what we offer to the mix.

The Home of Watch Culture is us. Realising this, and owning it – the good and the bad that comes with setting up camp in the watch culture, instead of strictly watch review space – is in fact a much bigger deal than a new website.

This new site is powered by you – the information basically stacks based on what’s popular, and what’s happening

In the same way that our first website was almost impressively unresponsive to the whims and wonders of each day, this site is quite the opposite. It is dense with content, and that content is largely arranged so that if you want to know what’s trending in watches on the day, you’ll see it quickly, and barely a click away.

You’ll also be able to pick up on search trends. This is going to take a little while to get going, as the data accrues on the new site, but it will be pretty great when it’s humming.

As for the rest, jump in there, have a look. It’s the first of several big updates that will roll out over the coming months. We’ll keep those giant leaps for another day. For now, we hope you like what we’re changing into, and we thank you in advance for coming along for the ride.

Andrew