An update on the STLtoday redesign

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.