CJOnline redesigns

April 17, 2003, 2:29 AM ET

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 onclick instead of an onmouseover.
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?