How to Make the Most of Facebook’s New Redesign
Old Facebook is leaving; Long live the new Facebook, a redesign that will soon be permanent. Facebook turned to Facebook to warn its users that the old style will disappear in September. And, unlike the current New Facebook test, there will be no way to switch back if you are not a fan of it.
So let’s make New Facebook work for you – and I promise to stop calling it that if you promise to stop saying “ DelEte FacEBooK! one! one! , ”Followed by your favorite curse in the comments. We’ll get it. You are allowed to hate any service you want and others can use it for any reason as well. OKAY?
New sidebars … something.
Do me a favor: just don’t click the Learn More icon on the left-most main Facebook sidebar because it will explode and show you the way, there are many more options than you are likely to use in the service. I mean, look at this:
However, if you’re trying to find something – anything on Facebook, when you swear – then existed, and now you do not know where it is, it’s probably where – in this sprawling, non-alphabetical sidebar.
Expect a hybrid of old and new Facebook
I’m not sure if this will change in September, but some of the sidebar elements link to Facebook sections that don’t seem to be modernized for the new Facebook design: that can’t be true, can it? This is an old Facebook design.
I hope Facebook next month or so will go through the various sections and update them all to the new design. However, it is possible that this will not happen completely, so expect to see some pages that do not look quite right. Likewise, while Facebook should carry over the same settings as before, there may be cases, especially if you are a group admin, where the settings you used previously are simply not there. Right now, Facebook has advised going back to classic designs to use them; we hope they will come back as soon as we all use the newer version.
Your shortcuts are your friend
One way to help avoid Facebook clutter is to make extensive use of its new Your Shortcuts section , at the bottom of its left sidebar. All the links you see here are created for you based on Facebook’s understanding of which groups, pages, and games you are most likely to visit. Hover your mouse over “Your Shortcuts” and click “Edit” and you can pin whatever you want to the top of this list:
What about the right sidebar “chat”?
Remember how you could completely hide the far-right sidebar that shows all your Facebook friends and active group conversations? As of this writing, this capability no longer exists in the new Facebook redesign. The right sidebar isn’t going anywhere – and of course there is an advertisement at the top.
The best thing you can do to reduce clutter is to click on the three-dot icon to the right of Contacts and turn Show Contacts off. And if you want to be completely silent, you can also use the Disable Active Status option so people never see you are online. They will still bother you if they write to you unexpectedly, but hopefully it will discourage them.
What the hell are these new navigation icons?
In Facebook’s redesigned design, you’ll now see a top navigation bar with five key icons.
The first and most obvious one is your news feed . This is where you’ll be by default whenever you download the good old Facebook dot com (and what you can get chronologically with this little hack ). The second icon leads to the ” Watch ” section on Facebook, where you can find everything related to the video. The third is the Facebook marketplace – buying and selling goods. The fourth page is the landing page for all your Facebook groups , and the fifth is for Facebook Gaming .
I’ll admit, I’ve never left the Facebook news feed, but that’s just me. If you are good with these other Facebook sections, you will find them here.
A faster way to create content
One thing I love about Facebook’s redesign is the giant plus sign in the top right corner. Click it and you’ll be presented with a list of keyboard shortcuts that you can use to create all sorts of new content, pages, and groups around the site, including Marketplace listings and events. It’s much more convenient than searching and opening, say, a Facebook events page, and then finding the navigation to create a new event and …
Turn on dark mode
Another added benefit of Facebook’s redesign is that its new dark mode is now very obvious and easy to customize. Click the dropdown arrow in the upper right corner of the Facebook page and you’ll see an unmissable option to enable a spookier look.
What about … Facebook settings?
Here’s the good news; It looks like nothing really changed with the Facebook settings layout. At least two versions of your settings page look very similar:
There are no longer any new settings that can be used to change the look and feel of the Facebook redesign. At least I didn’t find anything that completely blew me up – and it didn’t exist. We’ve already talked about all the general Facebook settings you need to know , so I’m not going to rip them off for now.
However, I wanted to draw your attention to one useful little update that you will find in the Facebook redesign. Click on the dropdown arrow in the top right corner of Facebook again and click on Settings & Privacy, which you probably already did if you want to check out the main settings screen firsthand. In the dropdown menu, you will see several new shortcuts:
I recommend checking your privacy regularly as it gives you an easy way to confirm various privacy and security settings and quickly set them up if you want to further block your Facebook account or restrict other users from interacting with you.
The Privacy Shortcuts section will take you to an expanded list of options that you might have overlooked upon a quick glance at Facebook’s general settings. This includes the always important “Advertising Preferences”, which allows you to restrict the way your data is exchanged – at least as much as you can – between the many applications, services and companies that interact with Facebook. It would be frustrating to have a look at the many different options on this screen, but I’d say it’s an important part of working with Facebook.
Finally, the very important newsfeed settings are definitely worth exploring if you want to tweak what you see on Facebook a little bit. This is where you can prioritize specific people or groups in your feed by unsubscribing from annoying Facebook accounts you can’t protect and give the people you’ve unsubscribed from a second chance. And of course, you can control my favorite Facebook feature – Powerful Snooze. Take people out of their temporary penalty area, or add more time if you’re not sure they’ll become less annoying when their 30 days of silence are over.