February 7, 2003

If you change it, they will come

An arti­cle on Poynter’s E-media tid­bits con­firmed a sus­pi­cion I’ve always had about Web design.

“Every area is going to change fre­quently, even sev­eral times a day,” says Robin­son. “That was a key point of fan feed­back — that for two and three days at a time, the site looked basi­cally the same, even if we did put in new stuff. People saw that same­ness and were on their way to some­thing else.”

I’ve always felt that newspaper’s sites were con­strained by a.) their back­end soft­are and b.) tight dead­lines and a con­tent staff that may not feel com­fort­able chang­ing a Web pages design.

This com­ment would seem to indi­cate that it’s not just enough for a Web site to pub­lish new con­tent, but to actu­ally change some of it’s visu­als so that folks know its changed.

The system that most news­pa­pers use for updat­ing their sites involves push­ing a new head­line, blurb and maybe a photo to the front page.

This would be the print equiv­a­lent of run­ning every story in the same posi­tion as it was the day before, and just putting new head­lines and new photos on the page.

I think news sites should try and use edi­to­r­ial judge­ment in their design. The New York Times does this to some extent when there is a big story — they run the Web equiv­a­lent of a strip head­line and deck, and then the page con­tin­ues as usual.

In my free time (ha ha), I’m going to try and do a mockup of what a site might be able to do.

Of course this con­cept would be easier on non-​technical staffs if the back­end soft­ware could easily change to one of sev­eral dif­fer­ent layouts…

Filed under: Journalism,Web design

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