Newsdesigner.com | E&P's Virtual Critique of Online Redesigns

E&P's Virtual Critique of Online Redesigns

11:13 PM, January 6, 2006

Editor and Publisher notes that a crop of newspaper web sites have redesigned recently (including Austin, Houston and the Strib), and E&P's Jay DeFoore wants to know what you think.

E&P has chronicled some of the redesigns in this space, but many others have slipped by without comment. So in order to open a dialogue on the ever-evolving best-practices for news Web sites, we're asking our readers to browse a few of the recent redesigns and e-mail us with your thoughts.

Think of it as a worldwide virtual critique. What works, what doesn't? What could have been done differently, which features are right on the money?

To get you started, check out the links below to some of the most recent redesigns. If there are others out there, feel free to e-mail us with a link and we'll update this article with new URLs. Maybe you frequent a site that needs an updated look and user experience? Nominate it for a mandatory redesign.

We're asking you to send us your comments via e-mail because, quite frankly, we could use a redesign ourselves, as there's no comment function with our existing CMS.

So there you are. Let it fly.

>Announcing E&P's Web Site Redesign Contest [Editor and Publisher]

Related:
>Online Newspapers Are 99% Bad [Andy Rutledge]
>Why Haven't Online Newspapers Gotten it Right? [Kirk McElhearn]

Comments

Heads up: After you hit "post" things may be slow and you may get an error. Most likely, your comment did post. Apologies. I'm looking for a fix.

It's encouraging to see some of these redesigns are emphasizing semantic HTML and presentational CSS ( for example, the statesman, seattle weekly, and tcpalm). Most newspaper sites are still nested table kludges.

It's also encouraging that some of the redesigned sites are cleaner, more open, and easy to navigate. But, again, most newspaper sites are still the opposite: dense fogs of cluttered information, ads, and navigation.

We have a long way to go as an industry, so I hope the best of these redesigns are the beginning of a positive trend.

--Josh

Posted by: Josh Renaud at January 8, 2006 7:12 PM

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