Trotter

Fast headlines, effortless reading

Trotter is a modern reader for Rotter.net, built around a simple product insight: people come for fast, developing news, but the original website is visually noisy, dated, and difficult to read.

I developed and designed Trotter entirely myself, from the brand and interface to the working reader and its infrastructure. The experience prioritizes easy reading, responsiveness, and speed.

About Rotter.net

Founded in 1997, Rotter.net is a long-running Hebrew news and forum destination in Israel, used for fast updates, developing stories, and community discussion. Breaking news is posted there so quickly that the site is also used in military operations rooms.

In 2026, the site still has an old-school forum look: dense text, small links, and a layout that feels closer to the early web than to modern news products.

On mobile, Rotter.net still shows the desktop site squeezed into a phone screen.

Product Problem

Rotter.net has strong utility and loyal usage, but its legacy interface creates friction: dense pages, weak visual hierarchy, cluttered reading paths, and an experience that feels harder than it needs to on modern screens.

The opportunity was not to change the core behavior, but to make the same habit feel legible and current.

Product Decisions & Challenges

Conversations with Rotter users made the priorities clear: speed and responsiveness were essential, as was a strong mobile experience for following developing events on a phone.

These insights shaped Trotter. The interface keeps the latest updates and quick actions close at hand, while secondary information stays available on demand.

The visual design stays calm and easy to read across screen sizes. It supports quick checks on a phone while remaining unobtrusive when left open on a second screen.

The hardest part was deciding what not to show. When something needed to stay, I had to decide how to present it without letting it take over. These trade-offs kept Trotter focused on news as it develops.

Technical Discovery

I approached the technical side as a non-developer: by inspecting how Rotter's own mobile apps technically worked and tracing where the content was really coming from.

I coded it myself with AI, using it to read network behavior, test assumptions, and turn what I found into a working product. That process led me to the mobile data feed behind the app.

This let me move past a surface redesign and build a working reader around Rotter's real content flow. I hosted it through Cloudflare, so the project could run independently and improve quickly.