St. Louis Post-Dispatch Takes Heat for Website Redesign
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch released a redesigned STLtoday.com today and editor Kurt Greenbaum was greeted by a flurry of comments blasting the new design and pointing out numerous bugs, some causing big usability issues, such as ads floating over the drop-down navigation and a Site Map page that was completely blank (except for a 300×250 ad).
Some of the user comments:
“This is one of the major newspapers in the country and the website now appears to be established by a kindergartner. The design is very poor and does not lead to enhanced navigation. Good thing all I really care about is the sports.” - Matt
“Does there have to be so much crap “above the fold”: a big banner ad, a weather box, a huge stltoday logo, a Yahoo search bar, and all that white space? You have to scroll down to even see the lede. The color scheme is also pretty vomitous - how is teal better than navy blue? The old site certainly needed better navigation and bigger photos, but it looks like stltoday missed the mark yet again.” - southsidered
“It’s official! St. Louis web design has died in a pastel-gradient-overuseofjavascript-can’t escape from freddy krueger nightmare.” - Jookie
Feel free to comment on the recent redesign here.
7 Responses to “St. Louis Post-Dispatch Takes Heat for Website Redesign”
A faux pas, sure, but do a lot of people still use site maps?
(Full disclosure: I work for the Post-Dispatch, but didn’t work on the site redesign. And I’m on vacation this week, so I know nothing of what’s going on in the newsroom. But I think the site is 100 times better than what it used to be.)
By Erica on May 8, 2008
Yes, but it’s not necessarily people that use the Site Map most. Search engines really like them because it makes it easier for them to find important pages within a website.
By Chris Wallace on May 8, 2008
I, too, work in the Post-Dispatch newsroom, but I didn’t work on the redesign. A couple of things set this redesign apart from previous ones, though: It was executed in-house by the newsroom — not by another department. And it was produced in Lotus Notes, which is contributing to some of the wonkiness users are experiencing.
I’m with Erica, though: Our new site is a much better product — even with the bugs — than the previous one. I can find things on it now; I used to do Google News searches to locate stories on STLtoday.
By Gabe on May 8, 2008
I don’t have a ton of bad things to say about it except for the front page. As a news portal, it should not have a single banner ad on it. It should really allow the user to find stories of interest and engage with them. That’s when the ads should start appearing, after the user’s attention has been captured.
Plus, there should an iframe underneath the drop-down navigation window to keep the flash ads from popping over (IE bug).
By Chris Wallace on May 9, 2008
Yeah, the new STLtoday is bad. Real bad. The old one was bad too. This one is worse. Please just copy off of latimes.com next time.
By Nick on May 9, 2008
Oh Chris. Tell me you’re not using I.E. Not as a primary browser at least, right? Please?
Nick: Copy the LAT? You can’t do that … you shouldn’t do that. Why would you want to do that? The LAT has a good site — for them. It doesn’t work for the other Tribune papers. (Trib used to have uniform site design. That’s changed.) It wouldn’t work for the STL market, either.
By Erica on May 11, 2008
I use it when I test a website. Any front-end developer at the very LEAST should be testing for IE6, IE7, Firefox 2, and Safari 3. You can’t develop a website for Firefox and just tell your users not to use anything else. That won’t fly.
By Chris Wallace on May 12, 2008