Tangled Web
Washingtonpost.com is a thicket. There’s upward of 70 blogs, 9 million chats, a gazillion stories, and just one homepage. If you have trouble navigating all this, help is on the way. The people at the Post’s Web site are busy redesigning the entire thing, top to bottom.
Working with New York–based Web site development firm the Wonderfactory, the paper’s dot-commers are looking to ditch a look that has undergone a number of cosmetic changes but “is not wildly different from the design in 1999 or 2000,” according to Jim Brady, washingtonpost.com’s executive editor.
In many ways, the exercise is a feng shui operation. No longer, says Brady, should users plow through clutter to locate features such as onBeing or Achenblog or a Marc Fisher column. “People have to be able to find things easier than they can today,” he says.
Another goal is to integrate video into the site “more than we do,” in Brady’s words. With that much work ahead, Brady gives no firm deadline for finishing. “At this point, I’d love to get it done before the election,” he says.
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1:07 pm
The basic need: real hypertext content editing. The Post has pretended to this for years, adding hotlinks on articles to past Post articles, relevant or not. This is infuriating and is anything but an enhancement.
See http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/2007/11/09/wapo-editors-hy-per-link-look-it-up/
2:51 pm
Speaking of website improvements, when is CP going to make all its great photography more accessible online? Surely you have more great images per week thank you have space to afford in the printed edition. You also must have a somewhat historic collection, which could offer gems from the CP archives from time to time (80s, Barry, come on, it’s a gold mine).
3:12 pm
When is the Post going to have a single page view for its stories?
For that matter, why does it break up articles & columns into two or more pages without any rhyme or reason? There are days when two different articles of the same length will be on the site, one is a single page & the other is two pages.
5:13 pm
Every redesign of the Pos website has made it harder to use. Nevertheless, it still seems neater than the NY Times site, which attacks your senses with 7,000 different places to click right at the outset.
Back to the Post: They seriously need to take some kind of vote on which blogs people find useful (and clicks don’t count as votes, as Marc Fisher generates tons of clicks merely by being a moron and posting things like his inability to buy shoelaces). Well, I guess clicks do count as votes when you are sellind ads.
And last but not least, I still don’t know why newspapers think I am coming to them to watch video. It can be aggravating to click on interesting headline or link only to have some video applet pop up. Stick with what you know best.
6:20 pm
the post was actually one of the developers of an early web content management system and now doubt the legacy of this is that they are saddled with something that doesn’t work as well as systems used by later adopters. i forget what it’s called but the link URLs are very distinctive and you used to see them on many websites because the product was commercialized.
11:22 am
I would say the Reuters website wins my praise, because it functions most like a newspaper would (actually, the City Paper does what is supposed to pretty well). There is a front page with the top news, and if you are inclined to dig deeper into other sections for other stories, you select from a few links to go where you want. Very simple.
Both WaPo and NY Times took the strategy of not presenting a nicely folded, orderly paper, but pulling that paper apart and spreading the pages haphazardly all over the place. That makes people read all the sections simultaneously rather than in a sytematic, orderly way (which is how people do actually like to read). I guess this maximizes clicks (and ads) as it forces people to wander around areas they would normally not care about, but I am the type that goes into a store knowing what I want to buy.
11:41 am
I hate to read Reuters stories.
Again, for the same reason as the Post, Reuters breaks up stories into multipage reads for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
Each page is two or three paragraphs.
When are websites going to learn, one page per story, PERIOD!
8:20 pm
I keep the WaPo website up on my computer 24/7, and I never see the homepage. I just link directly to Achenblog and any articles worth reading will eventually be referenced by Joel or one of his commenters. On Sunday, I use the magazine link from the A-blog to check out the feature and columns there.
I also read the New York Times online, and I couldn’t tell you much about their homepage. I barely glance at the headlines and then go directly to the 10 most emailed articles list. All the interesting articles are there. For straight news, I read the Miami Herald dead tree version every morning.
12:10 pm
Most newspaper frontpages look like the dog’s breakfast. We need crisper clearer headings and a tabbed interface. I would love to see a pdf link on each webpage that brings up the article in the original context. so much of the wonderful graphical impact of the dead trees version is lost with the little incomplete sidebar photos.