Well the Greensboro News & Record has launched the re-design of their website. I’ve been out of town and haven’t been keeping up as much as I’d like with the Greensboro bloggers like Ed Cone, but I can’t imagine they have had nice things to say about it.
Now I know that any one person’s opinion about a design of any kind, whether it’s a website or a house, is a very subjective thing. Some people like ranch style houses, others don’t. But there are certain design elements that most people agree on: with a house most people prefer that a doorway is high enough to walk through.
In the case of a website’s design you can look at several elements like color or font size and you’ll usually get some people that like it, and some that don’t. But what most people expect from a website is a certain ease of use. They want to be able to find the information they’re looking for as quickly as possible and in this respect I think the N & R site fails.
First you have the tab system on the home page, which is okay as a concept, but they have tabs in the middle and then other tabs at the top, and then other tabs on the left hand column. What the hell is the hierarchy here? (See the picture at left; click on it for a larger version). That middle tab set goes away when you click through to articles, but since the home page is usually a site’s entryway I’d think you would want it to be a little easier to navigate. One easy fix would be to get rid of the "Triad Marketplace" banner between the top tabs and the central tab window; that thing really screws up the eyes.
Now I have to say that I really don’t like the graphic design of the banners I’ve seen, and normally that wouldn’t bother me so much, but since they’ve decided to moonch them all together I feel like I’m looking at some kind of kindergarten collage project. Has anyone at the N & R heard of white space? And how about a design consistency? There is literally no flow from one design element to the next. Yuck.
As a testament to the design issues I offer this: The main reason I started reading the N & R are the blogs and it took me quite a while to find them. They are in another set of tabs (along with columnists and editorials) on the lower half of the home page, right-center. But when I click through on editorials I can’t find any links from that page directly to the blogs. Huh?
It looks like they aren’t done with the conversion to the new system (I’ll check their blogs for an update), but they are close enough to being done that I can tell you I don’t think they’ve done themselves any favors. I hope whatever they gained on the back end (i.e. administrative side) was worth it.
**Update** I’ve checked the N&R blogs and it does seem to be the case that the site is pretty far from done. Actually I don’t think any site is ever really done, so the folks at the N&R can definitely count on working on the site ad infinitum.
On anothernot I’m kind of regretting the tone of some of my comments above, if for no other reason than the folks at N&R have taken on a monumental task and are obviously doing the best they can. The last thing they need is some snarky Monday-morning quarterbacking.
That said, I really hope they re-work their design templates so that the site is easier to read and navigate.
Befuddled 
Amen on most of that, John — what I don’t understand is they launched a beta version about a month or so ago … they asked for and received comments on that, and then deployed a site that looks identical to the beta.
I didn’t see the Beta, but I’m not surprised that significant changes weren’t made. I’ve been involved in a couple of site re-designs and the commonality between all of them was the “Beta” was code for “we’re done with most of it and the only changes we plan on making are either minor edits or CEO-mandated changes.”
As you know there’s always a delicate balance between determining if a recommendation is merely a matter of taste (i.e. color) or is really a fundamental problem with the site (navigability or usability). That was my main thing: I don’t like the color scheme, but that’s just me. On the other hand I can’t be the only one who’s having a hard time using the site, which I suspect is the kind of problem they will want to address.
We hear you, guys. We have a huge, huge site. Some of the links are broken. Some of the things you note are being fixed as we speak. We got a lot of good feedback from the beta site and are trying to put it into effect. But it has taken longer than we wanted, and one of our key people resigned amid it all. We finally said, let’s just get the damned thing up and fix it as we go along. The web will understand that. So keep tuning it. It’ll get better as we go along. That said, we haven’t gotten unanimous, Jon, on some of feedback on some of the issues on tabs and navigability you mention, so that may not change.
Hi John,
I don’t envy you. I’ve worked on sites with just a few hundred pages of content and it was excruciating to go through the re-design.
Add to that the subjectivity that is inherent to the process, mix in a few cooks in the kitchen and you have a recipe for disaster.
Best of luck!
Lowder on N
Jon Lowder critiques the N