Web Site Downgrade
posted by Jen | 9:55 PM
How much does the Houston Chronicle's new web site design suck?! Feedback on their blog seemed to be about 500-1 negative, so maybe they'll redesign again quickly. It's obvious that they didn't have any sort of pre-launch beta run, because I don't think they would have accepted the design if they did. I hope they didn't pay some web consulting company major bucks to come up with that crap.
5 Comments:
Yeah, I don't like it as much as the old one. There is a version that is similar to the old one, www.chron.com/news... but I liked the fast loading and utilitarian look of the old one. :/
I totally agree! I was just ranting to Fred the other day because I couldn't find the things I normally look at on their website and it was really frustrating. I hope they change it back!!!
You know, I hated it at first glance, but now that I'm past the "change is bad" stage....I'm starting to like it more. Visually, it *looks* much nicer, cleaner, and more professional. Yeah, the ads are annoying and such, but it is a more modern look. I like the colors as well.
Since yesterday they've obviously done a bunch of work because it was SOOOOOO slow to load. But I'm not having that problem (which was a major problem) anymore.
They still have the news page like the old one if that's what you're looking for, which is nice.
Overall I'm starting to come around...
It might look better but it is not nearly as utilitarian - you have to click through 2 levels to get anything but the top 5 headlines and there's no place where they can highlight special features. Its annoying, because I click through news pages quickly, and want enough on the index page to tell me if there's anything interesting to read or not. The chron.com eliminated that! Personally, my favorite newspaper page is nytimes.com or sfgate.com. Neither of them are particularly flashy, but it puts the headlines of basically every article I may be interested in on one page, which makes me happy.
Yeah, the new design does take a bit of getting used to... Like Sarah though I'm starting to like it more.
As a person who's redesigned websites professionally, I can say it's very likely that the chron did some research on what people looked at/where they went on the old site. Some went there for news, some for weather, so on. The new design would then take the results of this data and put the most popular stuff on the homepage, relegating the rest to the menu system. Or, at least I hope that's the case... ;-D
Seriously though, I like the new design, but it's a bit busy for my taste and the colors give me a headache...all that orange is hard on my maroon eyes! ;-)
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