BlogWorks: The New NYTimes.com

« And Another Thing | Main | Labels, what do they really mean? »

April 03, 2006

The New NYTimes.com

The New York Times web site’s new design is much cleaner and far less a copy of the front page of their printed paper. Several commentators have called it bloglike.

The headlines are smaller, blue and underlined only in the “hover” state. (Does this mean that we can finally stop underlining links? Have usability standards at last advanced beyond Jakob Nielsen’s design for newbies with dialup connections ?).

The new nytimes.com is designed to a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels, instead of 800 x 600. This is a bit daring. According to recent data from sites we manage, only 49% of Internet visitors have monitors with that resolution, with an additional 11% at 1280 x 1024. So if you’re part of the 15% of the population still stuck with 800 x 600 resolution (or if you haven’t figured out how to change your monitor resolution yet), you won’t see the full homepage.

The designers at Avenue A / Razorfish strove to get the most important elements – the top news story and photo -- within the first 800 pixels. It’s still very nice-looking.

The Times press release about the redesign highlights what is surely the most important reason for the new layout:

For advertisers, the redesign provides new opportunities to reach an even more engaged audience. The new features encourage readers to spend more time exploring and sharing the richness of NYTimes.com. Advertiser benefits include:
* Larger and more dynamic ad positions on the homepage and throughout the site
* Streaming pre-roll video ads within a new video player on the homepage, section fronts and select article pages
* Special advertising opportunities around new sections such as "My Times," "Video" and "Most Popular"

The NYTimes.com remake follows the WSJ.com redesign two weeks ago. The new wsj.com is cleaner and better organized than the old one, but I find the redesign too conservative (what a surprise). While I have great affection for the biggest (and the widest) business newspaper in the country (full disclosure: my spouse works for the WSJ), the dot portraits on the web have got to go! In 1889, when the Journal was founded, halftone reproduction hadn’t been invented and illustrations were engraved on the metal printing plates. Now WSJ artists start with photocopies of photographs and hand-stipple the dots in. The portraits are endearing on the printed page but completely anachronistic on the web.

Posted by Laurie Mayers at April 3, 2006 09:31 PM