Tuesday, April 4, 2006

Looking at new looks: NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, wider, bloggier? Khoi Vinh says he didn't do it... well, not all of it... and he's proud of it anyway. He did join http://NYTimes.com in December after many impressive Web design projects, including a redesign for http://TheOnion.com. And this week NYTimes has a new look... just a few weeks after The Wall Street Journal's http://wsj.com made its first major changes in four years. Vinh says that before he was hired, "the fundamental creative strategy" for the Times new look had been decided with the help of an outside design firm and a selection of new page templates had been designed. "I think it's a sterling piece of work, a great example of how to evolve a user experience rather than reinvent it," he says. Both the design and his team's efforts at getting the whole thing running this weekend are drawing more bouquets than brickbats in the first 72 comments at his weblog. And the designer says he'll be back with more comments on the project... just in time for this semester's "online journalism" students to add one more item to the reading list for the last month of school. In early comments, Jay Small says the Times is getting the kinks out. Anil Dash points out some blogger-friendly features of the site, while friendly blogger Dave Winer wishes it looked more like his favorite river of news, and is willing to put money on it. (The new Times also links to "most blogged about" stories, a feature I also noticed at the Washington Post recently.) Dave also pointed over to Archive.org's Times collection, where I waxed nostalgic awhile and found this copy of the Times "tour" of its Times tour of its 1996 design, back when designers didn't think readers would rather click on a one-screen home page than scroll down for more story choices. Both the Times and Journal sites have new tabbed navigation indexes, take better advantage of large monitors and have gone into personalization features -- called "My Times" and "My Online Journal." (A promotion for the not-quite-ready My Times calls it "Where the best minds in journalism help you edit the Web... a personalized page with what you like best in The New York Times and your favorite sites and blogs from all over the Web.") They also maintain traditional features of the newspapers and their earlier Web incarnations... and they both have nice multimedia pages that explain their new look. The Wall Street Journal's new look, however, seems to have had a little too much reliance on Microsoft Internet Explorer. Three weeks after its launch, a March 12 page explaining the redesign has what page designers probably call a "CSS glitch" when viewed with other browsers. I've tried Firefox (see at right) on a PC and Macintosh, Apple's Safari, plus Omniweb. The link "Click to Launch Tour" works, but its image floats out of the outlined box that's supposed to contain it. No big deal, but you'd think they'd have fixed it by now. Or maybe no one reads the WSJ without Explorer? Meanwhile, speaking of CSS page designs, I've recently discovered the quite lovely CSS Zen Garden site as a way to demonstrate how "Cascading Style Sheets" can allow designers to present the same content in an amazing variety of layouts. I've also stumbled on an Eyetools Research page from last year that shows how people's eyes move across two versions of the Zen Garden page. The same technology was used to analyze readers' behavior at major news sites a couple of years ago and the results are still online at The Poynter Institute's Eyetrack III. Finally, who's reading news websites? I haven't read this report yet, but I will try to, between homework assignments. 8:02:24 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2008 Bob Stepno. Last update: 7/19/08; 1:12:42 PM.