Another newspaper goes for an online redesign… Ah well. March 13, 2013
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Media and Journalism.trackback
Well, another week and another dismal revamp of a newspaper in its online format. As Garibaldy noted recently, the Sunday Independent along with its stable of companion papers saw a reformatting of their website making it even more tortuous than the original to use (and by the way being updated much later in the day therefore leaving any analysis to the late afternoon).
And this weekend the Irish Times went the same way. Larger text! Which is not an improvement when to navigate through articles one must click on successive pages across which they are now broken up (Slate.com which does much the same at least offers the full article as a single page option). Bigger pictures! A bit too big – and it raises the question what’s the point given that raw news is the product the IT offers with the photos an additional extra.
Then there’s the curiously small ‘THE IRISH TIMES” logo (very low resolution too now I think of it) set to the left and top of the page. Very strange, and then not one but two menu bars, one at the top of the page for Property, Cars, Dating (Dating? Tis far from here that Douglas Gageby was reared) and another with the contents of the paper.
I’m not sure what to make of the ‘Debate’ section, which has replaced ‘Opinion’. Given the remarkably trolling that typifies the comments section – like, where do the usual suspects get the time is my question – it’s not so much a debate as a rolling shouting match.
It’s all very… bitty, and it feels lightweight. Also it’s a lot more difficult to find stuff. If that were all it would be bad enough, but there’s a generic feel to the overall approach, with light blue used for highlights and so on and so forth.
As it happened it brought to mind this site. It’s not identical, but it’s close enough. Compare and contrast.
And oddly, someone in comments beneath this apologia/explanation argues that it look as if it was a ‘standard CMS template with the IT logo at the top’. That may be accurate or not, but it sure doesn’t feel too well developed.
It’s odd, I never thought they could make it worse than the previous incarnation.
Now, as to the contents…
I used to have a button for the IT on my bookmarks toolbar. On seeing the redesigned site, I deleted that bookmark – deleted it with extreme prejudice.
The new site is very confusing to use, counter-intuitive and user un-friendly. Maybe the IT are trying to tell us to buy the paper instead? Also, one of the curious things is that the letters page now has letters from several days all on the same page. Today’s letter on the property tax was actually first published on Monday, for instace.
The mobile versions of the Irish Times and the Irish/Sunday Independent websites are terrible. Tweaked versions of the desktop sites (which are pretty poor anyway). The IT mobile site jumps all over the browser as it tries to scale down and leaves clutter all down the right-hand side of the screen (tried it on both a smartphone and a tablet running latest Android). The Indo sites have no end of problems loading and with text/article/page expansion. It usually just disappears.
Being greedy for visitors to show advertisers by using linked multiple pages for an article is counter-productive. It discourages people from visiting and is not a true reflection of traffic. And advertisers now know it. That is like soooo mid-2000s
Given that the majority of newspaper websites are now viewed via mobile devices (phones, tablets, etc.) one would have thought that their mobile websites would be the priority.
“…standard CMS template with the IT logo at the top”
Exactly my first thought. Like one of those javascript over-laden “Best WordPress Template Ever” things that spam the search results when you’re looking for anything relating to a CMS.