New Guardian website

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1

Quite a barrage of dislike of the new Guardian (newspaper) website. With currently over 3000 comments, 99% saying they are not impressed.
I don’t think those involved in designing and developing the new site will have happy faces on today.

Here’s an interesting article behind the guardians thinking: http://m.thedrum.com/news/2015/01/28/guardian-overhauls-site-anticipation-publishers-selling-ads-based-time

And another though this one gets slammed a bit:

I sometimes feel we are going round in circles and will eventually end up with black text on white screens, with precious little in the way of whiz bangs. Something that is happening with camera design at the moment, with manufacturers realizing that Ernst Leitz and Oskar Barnack got camera design right in the first place.

s

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2

Shame, as I really like the new Guardian site. It’s one of my favorite
daily reads.

Bravo, Guardian! Terrific design, well done.

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3

Errr. to me its a bit of a mess or perhaps more precisely lacking consistency that gives a feeling of disorientation.

The main section headings/articles vary too much and then you have to ‘Read More’ that could be a few more or a whole grid of articles. Some time stamping on these various articles might be good, as they do with comments. More grading in some way.

Anyway its free so little to complain about, and I’ve adblock on so unlikely to click and advert. :slight_smile:

s

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4

I’m with Ernie, I like it.

It follows a trend where news sites are sorted by mosaics of content. Bloomberg, Wired and USA Today comes to mind.
http://www.bloomberg.com

Marcel

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5

Hi Marcel,

The USA Today is particularly nice of these three.
I think one of the issues with the Guardian site is the ‘view more’ and the number of clicks you have to do to progress, basically poor navigation and organisation of items.
There should be more items presented before you have to see more. Also when you do go to look view further your presented with a brick wall of items, some coloured others not, very confusing. So you have to hunt around and that I think is a major turn off. A more structured cascading presentation in my mind would work better and where possible accompanied by an image, as they had before.
What I’ve found the past few days is I look at the main items and thats it.

Over four thousand comments, most of which are a big thumbs down, I don’t think the designers should ignore or dismiss them, let alone be arrogant about it.

s

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6

Since I’m aware, that the re-design of http://www.bostonglobe.com opened a new chapter in web design, I’m fascinated of the big monolith “newspaper” at all.

Basically I’m happy, that mine is physically in my postbox, still smelling like printery. I grab em, carry em - the sports part for me, the rest for my wife - I love it.

The next day, we wrap biowaste (is it an english expression?) in it - one day in may life thrown away - expecting the next.

The digital life is perhaps much harder. Being popular each day, but keeping older and interesting things - and if yes, how long? And where archived?

I can’t judge “digital” news at all - I don’t read em. But if - and especially in this list for educational purposes - I always set myself in the position of:

“What happens, if local newspaper runs my door - firing 120 000 US$ (or whatever currency) with the words: We heard you’re the best - expecting results - great results by the way.”

Meee? The biggest hater of blown up pages? The one who hates to be lost after the second or third click in the digital nirvana? It’s damn fair to judge things - but honestly it’s too easy to write some smart comments.

Now that I know theGuardian, watching it twice - and giving it a further chance, I am about to say, that they made things great.

What I specifically like is, that they avoid those “mega-menu flying out because we need everything in the menu bar bullshit”.

And when I click on an article excerpt, it carries me to the expected article (as far as I can see).

Interestingly enough is a new trend, where newspapers, radio-stations or power-blogger consider removing the “comment” function from their articles and posts. I haven’t thought about it yet - but it’s not only caused by “bad comments”.

Cheers

Thomas

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7

It’s kind of funny, so many different sites are switching over to having either a sticky menu bar or having some sort of site being mobile. Some sites are better than others, but personally I think these sites and newspapers are trying to out due one another and get something up quick and then work out the kinks later on when they do updates.

My mom recently got the new yahoo.com on her computer and it looks terrible but I think it’s due to the whole motion of “mobile development” for websites. Some sites are still not mobile friendly, but I think that in the next few years every site, or at least the big companies, will be mobile friendly.

You would think a site like ESPN.com would be mobile, but not yet!

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