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Well, the Star-Bulletin has taken another stab at redesigning its homepage. Any thoughts?
Since I have always had a longstanding affection to Blaine Fergerstrom's bare-bones, hand-built, text-rich original presentation (except for those #@Q% frames), and a strong "old fashioned" streak in general, I know I'm probably more critical right off the bat. I probably have to stew on it a bit.
But my initial reaction? Not neccessarily an improvement. Yes, it's less cluttered, and the center focus is now clear.
I'm not a fan of the cosmetic changes -- the beveled corners, the rather bitmappy "drop shadow," the prominent addition of orange to the color palette (a tip o' the hat to KITV?).
The main photo is more prominent, which is good. The shift to sans-serif fonts, long the standard for heds and copy for news sites, seems pretty complete (though the missed the "— ADVERTISEMENT —" caption at the very top!). That's fine, but... without using color or underlines on the main page for story hed links, it's less intuitive to know where to click... the "Top Stories" column looks at a glance to be one long story, not several excerpts. I can see not liking underlines, but the workarounds can be a bother. (See how the Advertiser's top story hed is bold serif but not maroon like other heds... so in case visitors don't know to click it, they have to add a [more] to the end of the blurb.)
And why they continue to like dashes (-----) for decoration/accents I'll never understand. For text-only presentation, sure, but, it looks amateurish with all the other changes they made.
But, architecturally, it seems the did take another big step toward phasing out frames. Thank god! Individual articles now stand alone. There aren't redundant index1.html (with frame) and story1.html (no frame) files -- just flat pages for each story. It just might get easier to link to them, finally!
Since I have always had a longstanding affection to Blaine Fergerstrom's bare-bones, hand-built, text-rich original presentation (except for those #@Q% frames), and a strong "old fashioned" streak in general, I know I'm probably more critical right off the bat. I probably have to stew on it a bit.
But my initial reaction? Not neccessarily an improvement. Yes, it's less cluttered, and the center focus is now clear.
I'm not a fan of the cosmetic changes -- the beveled corners, the rather bitmappy "drop shadow," the prominent addition of orange to the color palette (a tip o' the hat to KITV?).
The main photo is more prominent, which is good. The shift to sans-serif fonts, long the standard for heds and copy for news sites, seems pretty complete (though the missed the "— ADVERTISEMENT —" caption at the very top!). That's fine, but... without using color or underlines on the main page for story hed links, it's less intuitive to know where to click... the "Top Stories" column looks at a glance to be one long story, not several excerpts. I can see not liking underlines, but the workarounds can be a bother. (See how the Advertiser's top story hed is bold serif but not maroon like other heds... so in case visitors don't know to click it, they have to add a [more] to the end of the blurb.)
And why they continue to like dashes (-----) for decoration/accents I'll never understand. For text-only presentation, sure, but, it looks amateurish with all the other changes they made.
But, architecturally, it seems the did take another big step toward phasing out frames. Thank god! Individual articles now stand alone. There aren't redundant index1.html (with frame) and story1.html (no frame) files -- just flat pages for each story. It just might get easier to link to them, finally!
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