Eventually everyone needs to change and I believe that CNN has done a good job taking their site to the next level. Having top stories with pictures as the dead-center, main content is nice and probably entices viewers to read stories they might otherwise pass over. It's good to see that, according to the article, they've re-focused themselves on video stories. After all, CNN got its start on cable TV. By including more video on the site, the news giant has come full circle.
While I think the new site design is nice, I do have a few complaints. The first is load time. My home computer is an older machine and got bogged-down when I was going through CNN's new site. It takes significantly longer to load the new design than the old one. The extra wait time made me want to leave their site and search for a particular story on a simpler site, just so I could get the information quicker. My other complaint is the placement of the list of latest news stories. While I am glad they kept the list, I think it's placed too low on the site. I prefered to have it beone of the first things on the screen when cisiting the site. That way, I could scan through the stories while the rest of the page was loading and see what interested me.
I know both complaints are personal opinion and may change if I had a faster home computer. My experience is a result of being unwilling to sink more money into a computer that I use mainly to manage my music collection and check email. I know I'm more likely to use a different news site than wait of CNN's page to download or spend money on a new computer. I can't help but wonder how many people find themselves in this situation.
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First of all, dont apologize for having personal opinions. That is the whole point of a blog post.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, your point about the load time is completely valid. There are still PLENTY of users around the world with 56k connections, or that have other reasons for having a slow system. CNN is definitely alienating those people. That is unless they have a low bandwidth version, which is completely possible. If that is the case I would try to figure out what the alternative url is so that you can use it at home.