April 17, 2003, 2:29 AM ET
CJOnline redesigns
The award-winning Topeka (Kansas) Capital-Journal site, CJOnline, has redesigned. (See the editor's note.)
Here are a few quick thoughts. Full disclaimer: CJOnline is one of my employer's competitors.
- The design is mostly CSS-based. (I say "mostly" because some page elements, such as navigation, are still coded using
tables.) As always, use of this technology should be applauded. - Netscape 4 users are redirected to a "sorry, your browser is not supported" page. It's a cute message, but isn't the Web Standards Movement about making content accessible to all devices?
- The reader reactions are fascinating and instructive. Plenty of insight here, from normal Web users who don't know (and likely don't care) what stylesheet-based layout is.
- The site uses quite a bit of DHTML to let users show and hide certain pieces of content dynamically. My first impressions haven't been favorable -- mainly because many of the dynamic widgets are triggered when my mouse moves over them, rather than when I click on them. That causes quite a bit of "Oops, didn't mean to do that. What was I looking at before my mouse cursor moved over this picture?" The home-page widgets (e.g. the "Breaking News" at the top) are a decent idea and would be improved a good deal with this quick fix: an
onclickinstead of anonmouseover. - It took me a while to notice the horizontal Flash bar on the home page; I had ignored it because I thought it was an ad. Surely there's a better way to present this content than through an animated Flash bar that looks awfully like a dreaded banner ad. Not to mention, what's the difference between "Sports1" and "Sports2"? And why aren't they next to each other?
April 17, 2003, 1:47 AM ET
NYTimes.com article pages lose left rail
The New York Times' Web site no longer features left-rail navigation on its story pages. Here's an example. Instead, it's got a new breadcrumb navigation scheme. From what I can tell, the change hasn't been implemented throughout the whole site yet, but it's on many pages. (Thanks to my friend David for the heads-up.)
I sense they made the change in order to make room for large ads on the right side of the page. Previously, the site embedded large, distracting ads in body text, making articles difficult to read. As far as I can tell from clicking through the site this evening, this practice has been discontinued on the pages that don't have a left nav.
At face value, this minor redesign seems like a positive change. But I fear the Times might've thrown the baby out with the bathwater. The lack of a left navigation bar creates a wider content area, which is either more readable or less readable, depending on whose usability study you're reading. The Times' opinion pieces are particularly wide now -- some go clear across the page.
And it's obvious that moving from section to section (e.g., from International to Technology) is significantly more difficult without a trusty sitewide-navigation bar always at your side. I get the feeling breadcrumb navigation is being relied on a bit too heavily.
Also, the fact that the Times' ads now appear outside the content area sounds like good news at first, but might it be a sneaky way of introducing even larger ads? I stumbled upon a nytimes.com page that featured a 336-by-850-pixel ad. That's, like, bigger than my face. Just because an ad isn't in the content area doesn't make it any less annoying; in fact, I'd say that humongous ad was more annoying than any other inline ad I'd seen.
