I was going to say something scathing about leaping forward into lockstep, cookie-cutter design with other major, commercial web-presences but looking over the new CNN website again I have to admit I would be wrong. They've maintained their 3 column format and have increased the navigability of their homepage by placing more categorized content "below the fold", allowing for access to a greater variety of content with fewer clicks. What has changed is their color-scheme and top nav and the way that they are including media in their spotlight areas.
The move to increase the amount of video makes sense, the bandwidth capacity of most hand-held devices has increased to the point that distributing more graphic rich content, and in the near future compressed video, makes sense. This has the added benefit of playing to the strengths of what is (or at least started as) a television network and removing them from competition with newspapers like the NYTimes, an outlet that sports a look not to unlike the former layout of the cnn.com site and is traditionally a print publication with the business culture to support more text/photo rich content, even on the web.
I can't say that I like to see a major supplier of information move away from the written word in a nation that seems increasingly willing to do just that but from a business standpoint it seems to make all the sense in the world. If you are a television company, produce some moving, talking material and play to your strengths. The redesign of their website seems geared to allow CNN to do exactly that.
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I wish the average web user (myself included) has the time and discipline to read more traditional text articles. However we have become more geared towards snippets of information and multimedia. So while this move away from such formats only increases these new tendencies, as you mentioned "from a business standpoint it seems to make all the sense."
ReplyDeleteI fully agree with the title, the new cnn is better then fox's site. The main point I have to dissagree with you is that there is written text. No one is drawn into a story by a giant block of text. If you got assigned to read a chapter in a book you are hoping there are pictures and graphs on those pages. Same here, you may have to dig for all the text, but there is still plenty.
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