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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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14 June 2006 - 9:38 am
I'm not a big fan of the new stltoday.com design. It isn't bad, I guess. But it is really boring. And yes, it's wider. But that width wasn't used to make things easier to parse. It isn't any easier to read the top headlines, for example. They're still relying too much on bulleted lists of bold text. It all runs together and doesn't make for a very easy read. Everywhere on the site I see a lot of missed opportunities to increase the vertical spacing a bit and greatly improve the site's design. Let me give you an example. The two images below were taken from stltoday.com and nytimes.com. They're both simple lists of headline text linked to stories.
stltoday.com
nytimes.com
Which one do you find easier to read?
I don't go to stltoday with the intention of reading every line of text. I want to scan things quickly, click a link or two and move on. Instead, I try to scan things quickly, fail, and leave without reading anything. A few breaks or some line spacing would go a long way to increasing the readability of the site.
Posted by on 14 June 2006 at 9:16 AM
Comments
Good point: The page loads significantly faster than before.
Bad point: Load time for the flash segment appears to be two to three times longer than the rest of the page. You don't get to see the "big story" until it loads, and once it does load up, the only benefit from the flash is you get to see two other pictures.
Posted by ben on 14 June 2006 - 10:41 PM