The Age / Sydney Morning Herald websites - new look

Most of the changes are in layout land, with new visual priorities given based on web and user trends.
Here is my analysis of some of the most noticeable changes to the site:

Key Style Changes

• Whitespace - the site has gone for a cleaner look with more whitespace.  Content is more effectively grouped into sections and overall for me at least, it seems to be a bit easier to read.
  
• Hero Image - much more visual priority has been given to the feature image, putting it on the left to  become one of the first things that catches the eye, making it ideal for feature stories.
  
• Screen Size - The Age now features full support for 1024, having moved gradually towards it starting with moving the low priority content off-screen about a year ago.
  
• Headline Fonts - the move from sans-serif to serif fonts in the headlines.  Studies show that serif fonts can be easier to read, but this is usually refers to large bodies of text.  For mine, they clash a bit with the serif summaries.
• Sections Guide - this subtle feature is probably actually the most useful for me.  Located at the top of the page near the search, it uses some great dynamic HTML to open up an inline site map.
  

Key Layout and Content Changes

• Video - it is no suprise that with recent trends in use of video content on the web that greater page priority has been given to breaking news video content and moving towards channel based multimedia.
•  User Contributed Content - mention of the word "blog", which was once quite prominent is now scant, perhaps due to the popularity of and difficulty in controlling user posting.  The blogs are inconspicuously tucked away within sections and consolidated in the "Opinion" section, which is probably a good idea.
• Time, date and weather - are now much more prominent, which gives a greater sense of locality relevance.
• Feature articles - now get their own news ticker at the top of the page.
• Adsense - it is interesting to see that even the Age is starting to cash in with cleverly but discretely positioned context advertising ...
  

Other than these changes though, it is really not a significant redesign in my opinion, more like a revamp with a bit of shuffling around and a little gloss.  
I'm sure that most of the money was spent on the backend content management system.
Large newspaper and media sites like this one are always going to be tricky.  There is just so much content jostling for attention that needs to be managed to keep it current and relevant to website users.  However the Age, for me at least, is appearing ever increasingly cluttered and the homepage now scrolls for far too long.  More work, in my opinion, needs to be done to refine the information architecture further.
The website still reloads the browser every 3 minutes which can be annoying and more effective use of AJAX (whilst using techniques to maintain search engine optimisation) could have gone some way to solving this.
Still, I'm sure with the rate of change of the major websites, and as has been the trend with the Age site in the past, we can expect new features to be readily added now that they have overcome the initial hurdle of launching the new look.

Comments

Name *


Comment *


Verification code *


Regenerate code