An update on the STLtoday redesign

I must say I am surprised by all the bad feedback. While I liked the past design, I am as well a fan of the new. The white space soothes the eyes and makes the page easier to read. To the guy who said he was going to go to ksdk or myfoxstl, good luck! Those sites are horrible and ofter no NEWS. While not all is perfect, I am pleased to see the new features and look forward to logging in to STLtoday.com first thing each and every day

I no longer live in StL and access stltoday.com daily to get my fix. While the colors may be a little easier on the eyes, I am having a very difficult time finding a good list of news stories like the old site showed. This site seems to emphasize entertainment more than news. I like to think I’m open to change but really would be happiest if we could flip a switch and have the old site back.

The new website is really growing on me. At first it was a big change but Im starting to like it now. I like the new menu and being able to get around with out making four clicks through each page. Keep up the improvements

It looks like a couple kids designed the site in their garage. The look is very bush league and navigating it is much more diffucult.

Also, could you make the banner ad any bigger? I have to scroll down to see the top story and when I move my mouse down to click on the top story all of the dropdowns open up.

This is a terrible design. The font alone makes this look like a high school web design class were the developers.

The functional changes to the site are great, but the teal color is pretty awful next to the red in the logo and elsewhere. Aside from being visually unpleasant it makes the site look like a homemade page from the 90’s rather than the leading newspaper of a major city. If you’re going to stick with the teal perhaps you could change the red in the logo (and elsewhere) to a color that looks better. This may sound trivial but when the color scheme is so distracting/unpleasant it makes it hard to take the site seriously regardless of content/layout.

One more thing to add here.

I see above that you are already having issues with formatting, site map, broken links and the multi-media functionality is not ready yet.

Don’t you think you should have had the firm you hired test the functionality of the new site before opening up a blog explaining that you are aware of the problems?

Just my 2 cents working for a web design firm…..

I’ve been a dedicated reader of STLtoday.com for years. As a St. Louis native living in Chicago, I’ve found your Web site an invaluable source for information and breaking news on the St. Louis region, especially your sports coverage. I also have long thought that STLtoday was one of the best designed sites around. The layout was tight and easy to read and navigate - always a pleasure to browse.

However, your recent redesign has turned me off completely. It looks like the site took a step back to the mid-90s when many Web sites were poorly designed. There’s way too much white on the site (it really hurts my eyes), and what’s up with the teal green colors? Eek! While I appreciate the attempt to improve navigation of the site, overall the site looks unorganized and disjointed. Oh, and the new fonts are way too large. I feel like I’m reading a site for people with poor vision, yet the blinding whiteness of the site makes me want to leave STLtoday as soon as I get there.

I wish you’d reconsider these changes. I know you probably think that it will just take time for readers to adjust, but really the site just looks bad now. My daily ritual of regularly checking STLtoday is already waning.

I still don’t like the site. A news site should present news headlines and or summaries with links to stories as the major focus of the first page. Organize the sections just like the paper, i.e. Front Page, Local News, Sports, Business, Entertainment, etc. The blog stuff and belt should be off to the side, either left or right, pick one and be consistent (probably right so that you don’t have to scroll across to read the story content)

I ususally have multiple windows and browsers up on my screen. This site and the previous one are wider than most sites requiring scrolling from side to side. Not good.

I am glad that you are listening to SOME of the comments. Thanks for adding bolding or pre-paragraph half line space to make it easier to read. However, I am also a fan of primary colors and contrast. The muddy color text does not have enough contrast, even with the white background, making it hard to read.

The hyperlinks embedded in content are just barely different color than the content text, unless you “mouse” over them and they change color. That makes it difficult to find the hyperlinks. Hyperlinks should either be underlined or a substantially different color when embedded in text to be able to find them. The normal text color hyperlinks on the front page are OK, because a user can assume that they need to click on them to go to the actual story.

After reading many other comments, I can see that the overwhelming consensus on the redesign is negative. I really hope the people at STLtoday listen to the comments and reconsider the changes.

This redesign just makes me sad. I’ve lost one of my favorite sites to get information about my hometown. I honestly can’t stand the new site. My eyes are sore from looking at it. The teal reminds me of Miami Vice. I didn’t know it was possible to turn back the clock on a Web site by 10 years, but STLtoday has done it. Please, please reconsider! I’m so disappointed.

Nice look and feel… better resembles the paper format!

Mousing over the News - Business - .. - Marketplace bar is going to take a bit of ork to get used to mousing around it in the margins when I am not looking for that, but is a really good way to get to other sections quick,

When will you return to e-mailing entire stories? Or will you forever keep the stories online, for us to revisit as needed? If not stored online, the archive will forever be without the details by only having dead links in the Yahoo “STL Articles” folder.

Thanks,
Michael

Michael, thank you for your comments about the drop-down navigation. We know that it’s a little too quick on the draw and we need to tweak that, so it doesn’t pop up just by mousing over it. I also appreciate your articulating what we hope is a good feature of that, the ability to get anywhere on the site pretty quickly.

I’m grateful for the comments here. The more specific you can be about features that don’t work or things that seem confusing, the easier it is to try and address them. General comments such as “I hate the site” don’t really help us improve it. Some things are in the eye of the beholder (i.e. whether you like the colors).

And as for consensus? Well, I’ll grant you that the consensus of the several dozen people who have commented here is against the redesign.

Again, thank you all for being STLtoday readers, for taking the time to look over the site and for offering feedback.

Do the word “New Coke ring a bell? This format is the biggest mistake since that fiasco. DMF

Don’t mean to be so negative, Kurt. As a loyal reader of STLtoday, these changes are just a little tough to digest. Sure, the colors are judged by the eye of the beholder, but you can’t deny that several people have questioned the odd choice of (blinding) white, red and (gulp) teal. If a Web site literally hurts people’s eyes (I need sunglasses), it’s off to a bad start. Just saying…

@Kevin I don’t work for the Post-Dispatch so I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think they outsourced the design of the site. You might want to ask Will Sullivan, the Interactive Director.

I happen to really like the new site. I could do without the really big RSS logo, but the colors are good, I appreciate the increased whitespace. I think most of the complaints will be resolved once readers get used to where things are. ‘you can’t find it’, you just need to find out where it is in the new design and then you’ll not only appreciate the ease of use but how it looks as well.

Seriously people, get a grip. It’s a new design. It’s a good one. There are some kinks, they’re working them out. It’s still the best source for st. louis news and information going. Get over yourselves.

There is nothing I like about your new web site. Its hard to navigate, slow to download and the pop-ups are very annoying. Out of ten newspaper sites I regularly read the new St.Louis Post’s web site is by far the worst one I have ever seen. No one is ever opposed to some improvements but no one likes a train wreak. Please go back to your old site before everyone abandons you.

Dan

Search will not work
enter term, get unformatted page with navigation links (looks like the style sheet is missing) and no search results.
Firefox 2
XP SP2
DSL

I honestly do not like the new format! I find the site difficult to navigate and the stories in each section don’t “pop” the way they used to! What was wrong with the old format?!?!?!

Hate the new design. Today is worse than yesterday. pages still load V-E-R-Y Slow. Don’t mind the bigger text but main page design is very bad. Agree about too much white space. too much junk on main page. prefer to see listing of top news items. graphics for blogs and other stuff are a waste of time and resources. Hate having to really go the the news page or business page to see the major stories. Colors aren’t helpful.

I believe the new site is awful. It’s difficult to find specific articles. The plain Font and lack of spacing is not good. I believe a redesign was a good idea but the outcome is far less then stellar. I’d rather see the old site back. Try something that look likes nypost.com. It’s eye catching and easy to navigate.

I’m mostly a Cardinals coverage reader, and this redesign is awful. Graphically, it’s not attractive. More importantly, the usability is several steps down from the old website. Cardinals Bird Land blogger Derrick Goold gets a raw deal in this redesign, for example. He’s farther down the page, and the loss of his headshot makes it harder to find Bird Land. There are only links for particular Bird Land posts, but no direct link that I can find to get the page with headers for the last 10 Bird Land posts, where I used to check for new comments on recent posts. Having a separate link for Bird Land’s PCQ (PostCards Questions), rather than mixing them in with the regular Bird Land posts, almost guarantees that there will be fewer hits for PCQ. And all those giant shadow quotes on the blogs are a trademark of designers with their feet in the clouds and their heads up their … Effective designers serve the content, not undermine it.

What genius decided to put Cardinals Basics at the bottom of the page? Do you really want to bury Hummel like that behind the other columnists? He’s a Hall of Famer, for pete’s sake. The pull-down menus at the top of the page are terrible and the links on those menus are organized badly. When I hold the cursor over Sports to get the menu, the columnists and live chats are close by, but the main links to specific local teams, which must be what people want most, are all the way over on the left. This whole redesign reeks of being ill-prepared and badly thought out. I wonder how many months the “design team” wasted on it. I’m sure there will be some tweaks, but you’ll never get the whole thing fixed. Is this the third redesign in as many years?

I’m actually starting to wonder if this redesign is intentionally user unfriendly to force readers to scroll more down the page and search longer for what they’re looking for, in some misguided attempt to get more eyes on the advertising. That would be a lousy strategy for a printed newspaper; it’s suicidally misguided on the internet. Once I’ve bought a newspaper or had it delivered to my home, there’s a huge barrier to getting a different paper (if there is a competitor at all). But if you make my web experience annoying or even unpleasant, I’m a click away from migrating to a competitor.

I think that the new format of stltoday.com was a worse idea than the magazine-like format of the Saturday Post. Unfortunately, the Post is the only major paper in town, which does not leave many with a choice. I do not find all of the white space reader friendly, and the other colors have to go. It is very difficult to find anything, and I can no longer just pull up the page and look at “NEW” stories. The page is much slower to load, and I just do not have time to wait for each page to finish loading. I used to visit the site daily to find out what was going on in St. Louis and the world today. I will never return to stltoday.com and must now find another site to keep me up-to-date. Also, why was there not a lot of “publicity” to launch this newly formatted site? Did you take any of your loyal readers into account when deciding on the “new and improved” format? Very disappointing.

The new redesign is simply hideous and user-hostile to anyone seeking actual news vs. circus-sized ads and “American Idol” photos. The “issues” you say you’re addressing exclude the actual issue, which is a hyper-commercialization of what was a remarkably useful, accessible site.

Not only is the new site ugly, you have to peel an unusually fetid onion in layer after painful layer to find what you’re looking for. I have removed this site from my bookmarks and will look elsewhere.

Boy do I miss the old site. You had good lists of news items right up front, could see the headlines in about 2 seconds. You knew where the Cards stuff was. And the layout was much easier on the eyes.

I echo the comments of the guy from Chicago. I used to get on this site daily. It is down to maybe 1x a week. It’s just too painful and I rather than struggle through it I’ll do without my StL fix and get the Cards info on other sports outlets.

Love the new look.

One suggestion: tighten it up a bit, reduce the amount of white space between things.

Hate it. Hate it. Hate it.

Just so we’re clear, I hate the new site design. The old one was clean, compact and easy to get around. The new site takes forever to load in my browser, I cannot find anything anymore, and frankly, I shouldn’t have to scroll down three or four hard print pages worth of content to get the bottom of the page. You have too much on the front page.

I do not care for the new design at all. Makes using the site more difficult, can’t skim for what I want to read as easly. I use to frequent this site through out the day. I have given it some time to get use to and I still fell the same way. I will no longer visit this site like I use to.

I’ve given the new format a chance, but all that has happened is I like it even less than I did the first time I saw it.

This is a NEWS site. Not Perez Hilton, not Teen Magazine, not Entertainment Tonight. A large selection of article titles should be grouped ON THE FRONT PAGE, NO MOUSING DOWN just like they are on the print edition, e.g. Local, National, Business, Entertainent, etc.

The colors are pitiful. I haven’t seen so much blinding cyan and white since the bad old days of DOS graphics.

Please reconsider a change back to what worked, and worked efficiently.

Obviously you haven’t spent that much time in looking over the individuals suggestions about improving (which in a lot of peoples mind it didn’t need that much of an improvement).

First and foremost you need to get rid of the extremely white background (and many people have complained about this, as it hurts your eyes when looking or browsing the site for an extended time). Gee, add some splash of color in the different forums, I.E, blue and gold for the Rams, Red for the Cards, and Blue for the Blues hockey team. You need additional color through out the site, NOT enough pazza to have an individual wanting to come back to the site for any extended time.

I’m always on the site, EVERY DAY, but I’m sorry at the present I don’t like the set up and you need to do some extensive work to get it were people we WANT TO COME BACK, day in and day out.

I’m a retired Post-Dispatch employee (34years) and I think I have the knowledge and experience to show and shar with you and heres hoping that you at least consider some of my suggestions!

Ed Wheeler

I come from an old and quite well known family that has had it’s roots in St.Louis for well over a hundred years. I’ve lived in South Florida for the past twenty years or so. It has been a mainstay in my life to visit your website everyday so as to stay in touch with my hometown. I had come to find this website to be familiar, handy, and relatively easy to make my way through. NOT ANY MORE! There is already a consensus among the St.Louis expatriates that I see on a daily basis down here…. WE WOULD LIKE IT BACK THE WAY IT WAS! The new experience is a hodge-podge of confusion and misplacement. I hope that the peoples that instigated this change do not prevail and that your website will return to the familiarity and navigability that it had before. WHY NOT INCORPORATE THE NEW FEATURES INTO THE OLD FORMAT? There was no reason or need to reinvent the wheel here. Consider the senior citizens having problems with the change…I bet that there’s a bunch of them.

I was surprised to see the following message when I logged in:
“E-Mail addresses that match (’@gmail.com’) are restricted at this time from posting in our forums without additional information on record.
Please add an alternate e-mail address to your user profile that is not with a free e-mail service.”

Why?
(if you’re reading this, it means that this restriction is not in effect as I’m posting using my free e-mail service account name.)

I echo all of the previously posted negative comments. In addition, I truly wish you would make your design “iPhone friendly”. The load times are way too long for PC-based browsers much less the iPhone. But even if you had the patience to wait, all the white space makes viewing next to impossible on the iPhone. And those pop-ups? They destroy the experience.

As far as the redesign is concerned, I’ll simply say:
In with the old, out with the new.

As a former resident of St. Louis, the stltoday is the only way I can keep track to happenings in St. Louis. I still have family and friends in St. Louis and I use the stltoday everyday. I particularly follow the death notices and unfortunately on too many occassions have found a friend who has passed away. With the new format, the death notices are very difficult to manage unless you want to read each and every one. I also like to follow the St. Louis Cardinals and in the old layout, it was very conveniently placed. I do not oppose change but this new layout is not very professionaly accomplished.

I don’t like the new design. I gave it a few days to try to get used to it. But I don’t like the changing picture - even though it can be stopped with a click, if I change pages to read a story and come back, the pictures are moving again. It’s just annoying.
I don’t like the tiny little box with traffic incidents scrolling though it - is anyone going to sit there and stare at it to see if there is a possible incident affects them? Why not present a list which can be read immediately? It would be easier to find relevant incidents. And why not have a link to the traffic map right there, rather than in another area of the page?
More time and thought should have gone into this redesign. It has ‘fancier’ features, but there is a good reason why sites like cnn.com and other big news organizations don’t use these types of design — it’s annoying and inefficient.
While I still visit stltoday.com daily, I don’t stay as long as I find it unpleasant, and there seems to be a lack of news. If you were going to change anything about the site I would hope that you would add more news content.

After last weeks blog I would have thought the site would have been changed back to the old way after the hate mail I saw. Just to continue that thought, I can’t stand this new site from first glance to even give it a try to dig deeper into the enhancements. The new font style is horrible, chunky and difficult to follow. This new look appears very juvenile. I will start going to the local news channel sites from now on.

One word to sum up the new design: awful. Hard to follow, hard to navigate and it’s visually distracting. Worst of all, it’s hard to identify stories quickly that I want to read. I give up on it…going elsewhere for local news. The “new” Coke analogy was perfect. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Overall, this redesign deserves an F or F minus.

Quite a few people have already identified specific bad aspects of the redesign that I would have mentioned myself, had I wished to make a 2 hour assignment of the job. So let me just say: except to the extent that a small minority of the criticisms to date may stand in contradiction to one another, I believe I agree with every single criticism made so far by anyone else. I’d guess that less than half of the criticisms fit “after a while you will get used to it”, or “its a known implementation bug, we will fix it” scenarios. There are plenty of fundamental choices in the design, that are simply very bad choices.

The single most glaring (pun intended): Way Way Way Too Much WhiteSpace. Very very very hard on the eyes. To pick an immediate example, there is more than full inch of whitespace at the top of the home page, as displayed on my monitor. Admittedly not a 24 inch wide monitor, which would be able to display the temperature and a plug for the Champion business at the very right corner of that inch. I don’t want the temperature and advertising at the cost of an inch of above-the-fold space that could be used for news!

I’ll add one item about weaknesses in the Cardinals coverage. I haven’t found yet, how to follow the in-progress games on-line. This was easy to find, before the redesign. I’ve tried three times, for about 20 seconds each. Ended up going to the MLB site or the NYTimes site. And no, I will NOT watch a %#$* video to find out how to use the redesigned site. I’ll use some other site instead. I read 3 other news sites daily as it is, and the worst of them is a lot easier to use than this redesign.

Regardless of who you hired for this work…in-house or otherwise…and what you may have believed about their qualifications and experience…I smell the Kevin Kline character from “Fish Called Wanda” here. Wanda called him an ape, and he objected: “Apes don’t read philosophy!” To which she pointed out: “Yes they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it.”

Please restore the old design. Improve it, if you can and must — carefully. What you have now, is intolerable.

My thoughts: on the front page, too many small, irrelevant photos, not enough actual content. The old version was rather cramped (and dare I say, kind of ugly), but here’s what I used to look for on the front page:
The top headlines
The editorial blurbs
The local content
The dining content

The editorial blurbs are gone, and the dining content is buried, and hasn’t changed in several days. To critique, I don’t know how many clicks the news/sports/celebs galleries are really going to get (if people need to make the effort to click to see one tiny photo to click to see other photos, they might as well just go to the news, sports, or entertainment section in the first place). I don’t know if it’s some sort of mandatory thing, but I have never, ever, ever ONCE clicked on the little AP national news widget. I don’t even look at it, really. I figure that if there’s anything too relevant happening on a national level, it will probably be one of your top stories.

Too much information is hidden behind tabs, and when you go to the tabs, they’re devoid of actual text content - you just get a link, or a photo with no explanation (I’m not asking for an explanation, I’m asking for content instead of the photo), or maybe a search function if you’re lucky. I’m not particularly loving all of the sans-serif action in the crisp, white Web 2.0-looking interface, either. Most newspaper websites in a similar online format that I read use serifs. Granted, in the print edition, you use sans-serifs for headlines, but I’m pretty sure that you haven’t started using Verdana for the content of articles there.

The “belt” is near-useless and wastes space, the change to the forum topic lists from 8 to 12 is no major achievement, given that you merely changed it back to how long they were before I stopped using the forums. The deluge of pop-up ads also - I will note - coincided with the shrinking of the forum pages/the Lumiere ads plastered in the background/the rest of the annoying ad revenue-related changes. And yes, they’re still appearing (and in bulk), especially when I’ve idly double clicked while using a page.

In essence, the front page just seems like a version of the RFT’s website, except with almost no content. It screams “template” to me. The sections are there (albeit maybe not in an intuitive order), but the content isn’t necessarily. On the old front page, you used to get a sense for what was in that day’s issue of the P-D. Now, you get a sense of what the names of the newspaper’s sections are, but that’s about it.

So I like, in theory, that you’ve de-cluttered the website. But Web 2.0 is also about usability, and if you need a “video tutorial” to explain your website… it’s not particularly usable. Oh! And you need to stick the Post-Dispatch logo above the Yahoo search.

Granted I don’t live in St. Louis either but I used to be able to pull of the front page and find out the news quickly either on my phone or on the PC without worrying how long would it take to load before I could actually see the news (national & local). At work we are encouraged to limit our internet & bandwidth usage - I’m sure the moving pictures and larger graphics of the reworked web page are not limiting my bandwidth utilization. I also found the Stir interesting - doesn’t seem to be updated lately.

So now I use the Boston Globe, Denver’s 9news, Atlanta Journal Constitution , CNN, or msnbc to find news which normally is front and center on the first page.

Imagine my surprise today that the Kansas city websites were reporting the Kirkwood mayor back in hospital before St. Louis. No picture - just the headline with an article behind it giving the journalistic details of who, what, when, where, why, and how.

The paper is a mess & now you’ve messed up this up.
It is horrible . You really know “how to lose a gal in 10 days”.
I hope we find INTELLIGENT life out there (in space) it is rare down here.

The Good….loads faster

The Bad….dump the teal

The Ugly…pop ups

The new site is not dialup friendly at all. It takes a lot longer to load.

I just wanted to say that the older site was my easier to use in my opinion. The new one makes it diffucult to find what you want. On the old one you could see exactly what you wanted. Here you have to weed through all of links. Plus there was a little more design effort put into the old one. I personally would like to have the other more user friendly version back.

It wasn’t broken, so why’d you “fix” it? I really, really, REALLY don’t like the new design. And it’s not that I don’t like change- I do, when it’s warranted. But you’ve made the site much less reader-friendly. The old site was great. The main page gave a much better overview of all the sections. A little bit of everything. Now, lots of things are missing. For example, there’s nothing from Life & Style on the main page- I have to click it to see any Life & Style news.

The main page is just so much emptier now, and I feel like I’m missing a lot of updated columns that used to be featured there. I suppose I’ll get used to the new format eventually, but I really don’t see why you did this useless overhaul in the first place.

I see they now edit out the most negative comments from their feedback section as well. Nice.

There were many, many more negative responses yesterday, but somehow they mysteriously disappeared. Hmm… Cover up the criticism and the problem goes away? Nope. Still awful design and horrible functionality. Doesn’t change the facts.

It’s obvious that Mr. Greenbaum knows nothing about site design and his “About the Editor” resume is remarkably devoid of any online experience. It seems that the designer of the site enjoys the same lack of experience.

Your editors should be ashamed. I understand if there is profanity or threats or something of that nature, but most of the critical comments were trying to help you create a better product. I guess your skin is as thin as your design skills.

Stay classy Post-Dispatch. Those that want navigable sites are going elsewhere. See ya.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on exactly what it is about the changes that bothers me so much, and after reading the comments here I think I’ve got it. The changes age the site about 15 years and make it look the way sites used to look when the Internet was starting out. The professional look of the old site has been replaced by something that appears to have been put together by the staff of a high school newspaper. The old site was tight, efficient, professional. The home page was chock full of information, but never felt crowded. There was just the right amount of “white” space and no wasted space. A quick glance over the page was rewarded with the high points of all the sections.

Now, not only are there vast amounts of white space (which makes what IS there look sparse), but lots of WASTED space. Why is prime space near the top wasted with a blog excerpt, reader photo, and featured forum thread? These items are a bore and should be placed elsewhere, not in a space that is one of the first places the eye hits when looking at the home page. The highlights of all the sections should be there (as they were in the old site), not stuck way down at the bottom of the page. Put the blog excerpt, reader photo, etc. at the bottom!

And like everyone else, I do not like the teal. It doesn’t just age the site 15 years- it ages it 25 years. That color just screams “80s”.

Like others who have commented here, I used to check the site a few times a day because it was such a pleasure to navigate, but sadly have not even averaged once a day since the changes were made because it just doesn’t “feel” good anymore. Everything is too hard to find.

I wonder if you might consider putting things back the way they used to be. Your readers would forgive you for the temporary lapse in judgment and go back to eagerly visiting the site. There is no shame in admitting one’s mistakes.

Ant:

If, by censorship, you’re referring to deleted comments that were off-topic or personal attacks (and, therefore, a violation of our terms of use), then we plead guilty as charged.

I could hardly imagine how anyone could read these comments and suggest we’re thin-skinned. Your reaction speaks for itself. And I’m happy to leave it where it is.

As for my credentials, well, you didn’t try very hard, did you?

Please get rid of the huge quotation marks around each comment. Also, it was better when the comments were numbered. I understand there was a problem with the numbers being messed up when comments were deleted. Couldn’t this be solved by:

1. Replacing the deleted comment with a short “Comment Deleted” and leaving the number in place, OR

2. Removing the comment altogether and moving the numbers up somehow- turning what was comment 11 into comment 10, etc.

I am pleased to see that I am not alone in my distaste for your new design. As fastdata posted above, this is a NEWS site, and when I visit, I want news. In the old design, I could browse 25 to 50 story titles by simply scrolling down the page. Now I have to click half a dozen times to maybe get the information that I’m after.

Day after day, I’ve tried to give the new website a chance, but I find it easier to go to other sources….

I’ve given the site some time to improve, Kurt, but honestly it’s almost unreadable. The format of the stories is really difficult to read. Since when did the Web site stop putting spaces between the paragraphs? All of the text runs together in one big, gray mush. It honestly wouldn’t be so bad if the stories at least were easy to read. I don’t know what you guys were thinking, or who you have advising you on this new site, but it really misses the mark and I’ve had enough. I’m only coming back if some kind of emergency hits St. Louis. Looks like this is the perfect opportunity for the St. Louis Beacon to overtake STLtoday as the place for online news. You’ve lost this loyal reader.

It’s clear that the overwhelming majority of your readers are really disappointed with the new format. I’m one of them, but that’s beside the point. What bothers me is that you don’t really seem to be taking many of the suggestions seriously. You’ve responded to complaints about technical glitches, which is good. But you have been totally ignoring the complaints about the site’s look and layout that have been made by commenter after commenter. For example, there have been umpteen comments about the (horrible) blue color. Yet you only responded to the one comment that liked it. The same goes for the bad layout, the out-of-date, unprofessional look, and all the other valid complaints that keep coming up, over and over again. You haven’t responded to those complaints at all. Are we to take this to mean that you have no intention of changing anything other than technical glitches, that you paid a fortune for these awful changes and they are here to stay whether we like them or not, that our opinions mean nothing?

I’ve tried to get used to the new look, but the truth is that I just don’t enjoy the site anymore and I’ve been going elsewhere. Unless this new, awkward format is scrapped, I can see my visits dwindling down to nothing real soon. Sorry, but this site is just not worth my time anymore. Sad, since I really used to like coming here.

Look, someone at the Post-Dispatch needs to step up and fix things PDQ. The new site is a disgrace and this Kurt guy refuses to step up and report on any efforts to fix it, other than a little thing here or there. There’s a lot of news people are trying to keep up on, but the unusable STL TODAY site is getting in the way. This is a desparate request to fix things right away. I want to be VERY CLEAR, too:

THERE ARE PROBLEMS GALORE WITH THE NEW SITE. IT IS NOT JUST A MATTER OF PEOPLE TAKING A WHILE TO GET USED TO CHANGE. FIX THE PROBLEMS OR GET PEOPLE IN WHO CAN.

It’s interesting that Kurt hasn’t responded with a new blog post to the torrent of negative responses to the new site. Clearly the people at STLtoday think everything is fine, and will stick with this horrific new format. Not a single person I know prefers the new site, with many people saying it’s one of the worst redesigns they’ve ever seen. Everyone upset with this disservice to the St. Louis community should check out http://www.stlbeacon.org. It’s a new site featuring some former Post-Dispatch writers, and it’s MUCH EASIER TO READ.

FYI - Don’t be surprised if this post gets deleted. The people at STLtoday really hate that there’s finally competition in St. Louis for news.

Jason: Don’t be surprised if it’s NOT deleted, either.

Tom: I’m sorry you don’t feel I’ve been responsive. I’ll see if I can do better. We are working to address the technical issues that have been raised.

As for aesthetic issues, I’m not sure how to address that. We have heard from many people who like the look as well.

“As for aesthetic issues, I’m not sure how to address that. We have heard from many people who like the look as well.”

Well, I guess you just answered my question above of whether or not you’re going to do anything about the horrible layout and aesthetic changes. Did you really read all the comments? I’d say that the people who actually LIKE the new look are a very small percentage of the overall commenters, with the overwhelming majority HATING the new look.

I guess I was right: you must have paid a fortune for some company to redesign the site, and by hell or high water you’re going to get your money’s worth and keep those changes, even if most of your readers hate them.

I checked out the stlouisbeacon site that others have mentioned, and while it’s far from perfect, it’s much better laid out and organized, much more straightforward and easier to navigate than the PD’s new design. Between that site and a few others, I no longer need to visit the PD site which is run by a company that really couldn’t care less what its readers think.

Bonus: those other sites don’t take 20 seconds to load, requiring you to kill time elsewhere while waiting to see the headlines.

Slooooooooooowwwwww
Slow slow slow slow slow, I used to visit everyday. Now I visit once a week to see if you have changed back.

Kurt - It’s been a couple of weeks and I still like the new design. I’m not sure why everyone is STILL whining. Get over it already. I noticed earlier complainers stated they would “move on to another site”, but then are posting in the Interact columns. Maybe they came around after all.

Tuck,

It’s called a BOOKMARK. You can actually get to the forum without going through the STLToday.com home page. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, you can’t even get to this forum through the home page anymore. I know that I looked and looked and looked and came up dry. This included the site map. If anyone knows how to find this forum from the site navigation, please let me know.

It’s probably there but about as unuseable as the rest of the site.

Tom

I used to log in to StlToday several times a day to catch up on local news. Now that it is harder to get to and you have to access several pages to get the same information that used to be all on one page, I maybe visit 3-4 times per week.

I miss the old site…

I do not like the new format.

Here’s why:

It is hard to find breaking news and updates on current stories.

The Main category headings are concise, however there are so many vaguely-worded subcategories (and some are duplicates) that it is hard to navigate to the specific column or story you want.

That is my two cents, FWIW…

This new web site is terrible. My eyes go numb looking at this font on bright white back ground. Hate the drop down boxes at the top which continually open up everytime you try and navigate this 1984 looking site.

How much did this cost you all to design? A bucket of chicken wings?

Looking at the recipes, the last one that shows up in the list is ‘Barbecue Pork On Buns’, but the list obviously goes on. How am I to access the others on the list below? There are apparently 7 more recipes which apparently are available to no one.

Well now I can access all of the recipes, but there are fewer of them. ‘Barbecue Pork On Buns’ is now off the list. I guess that’s one way to solve the problem… less content.

I agree with the sentiment of almost all of those who commented. Plain and simple, the site does not look or act like a news website. That’s fine if it’s not going to be a news website. But if it is going to be a news site (and as a side note, why isn’t the address stlpostdispatch.com or stlouispostdistpatch.com?), then changes are necessary. For anyone who disagrees, pull up nytimes.com and stltoday.com side-by-side, and the utter inferiority of stltoday.com is crystal clear. I won’t go into how the news needs to be more accesible because by now it has been addressed over and over. Nor will I get into how slow the website is. Nor will I get into the wasted space or the whiteness of the site. And I won’t comment on the absurdity of the fact that a news website requires a tutorial video. One thing I will address, though, relates to the ads.

I recently emailed the editors and told them that the stltoday.com online content needs to be visible and appealing to the readers–not blocked by ads. The current setup creates an experience that is unenjoyable and detrimental to the value of the site and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

When one happens to scroll over what earlier today was a Sex and the City advertisement (which, due to its physical placement is almost impossible to avoid), the advertisement immediately covers the actual headline of the page (reading “stltoday.com”). Without a headline and with a huge Sex and the City advertisement taking up nearly half the screen, the page is utterly confusing. Is this a newspaper website? A pop magazine site? Where is the news? Toward the bottom of the page, a large Shubert Furniture ad, when expanded, covers 8 of the 10 most popular stories. I sure would love to know what those stories are, but I have to wait until the advertisement gives me the opportunity to close it before I can see them.

There is NO reason why the Post-Dispatch cannot become a better newspaper with larger readership and more influence in the news community. A great number of readers who you might want to attract do not live in town so they cannot pick up a copy at the corner newsstand. Obviously, the website’s success is if paramount importance to the newspaper’s success and growth (as well as to its own), and that importance grows every day. No other major urban newspaper I am aware of (and I read several daily) has such frustrating ads which make finding stories, at best, unnecessarily difficult or, at worst, actually unenjoyable.

David S.

Visit KSDK.com — it’s been redesigned and is everything that STLToday.com isn’t.

Goodbye STLToday.com.

> Visit KSDK.com — it’s been redesigned and is everything
> that STLToday.com isn’t.
> Goodbye STLToday.com

Amen to that. Apparently, StLToday management doesn’t care that they are losing traffic. In the past week, I can count my visits to StLToday on one hand, down from at least 5 times a day prior to re-design.

I’ve been reading the Rams’ news at your web site for the past 9 years. Since you updated the site recently, it seems to be slower than ever. It’s no longer a pleasant navigation experience. I’d vote to return to the previous version if I were asked.

I sent these comments via email this morning and was directed to this blog as a source of addditional information. It was nice to see that I wasn’t alone in my loathing of the new design. Here’s what I wrote:

To whom it may concern,

I’ve been a faithful reader of your website since it launched. I frequently visited the STLToday.com website first thing in the morning to get a handle on local news and local views given by your columnists and would return there if breaking news was being reported.

When the website was redesigned a month ago, I reluctantly accepted the changes and struggled through navigating the site these past few weeks even though I enjoyed the old format. After weeks of frustration, I felt compelled to write and express my disappointment at the recent revamping of the website.

Not only is it more difficult to navigate and find relevant news stories, I also feel the focus is skewed more toward entertainment and less toward actual journalism. While I recognize the revamping is geared to appeal to a younger demographic (it pains me to write that since I’m only 33 years old myself) I feel as if the site has lost some of its credibility in an effort to make it more interactive. For example, what spurred me to write this letter was my disappointment when I logged on this morning to see one of the top featured news stories was “Party People - iParty celebrates summer at Sky Terrace.” I cannot take the Post-Dispatch and the website seriously when it parades a slideshow of pretty party people drinking at a trendy bar as oneof the top four news stories to be featured, along with the flooding and the hostile takeover attempt of A-B. Moreover, the fact that the community voices and entertainment sections have taken a more prominent position in the website than the business section, the sports section (which boggles my mind given what a fanatical sports town we live in) and the regular columnists reinforces my position. Finally, I find I tend to forget about several of the columnists’ articles and regular features I would normally read when I saw a small blurb visible from the homepage that would pique my interest with the new design.

Needless to say, STLToday.com has no longer become my preferred source of local news for this region. While I don’t anticipate a response nor do I expect any significant changes, I do hope you take my humble opinions into consideration if you are in fact still working on the layout and design of the website.