A review of last week’s CNN.com and NYTimes.com redesigns

Two prominent online news outlets—CNN.com and NYTimes.com—have without fanfare redesigned their websites—and the direction they’ve taken is striking.

Neither site has undergone such radical updating since abandoning their neonatal designs in the late 1990’s. In fact, NYTimes.com had been clunking along with the same table-rific skeleton for eight years (see the 1998 design and the last pre-robots.txt design in 2003). CNN.com has historically been less conservative, trying out different designs (December 2000 vs. April 2005) taking a respectable stab at a standards-based design over the last year.

But the redesigns unveiled in the last two weeks are significant, not just in their scope, which encompasses both the look-and-feel and the architecture of both sites, but also in their acknowledgement of—some may argue capitulation to—aggregator, blog, and social-site design. . . .

First and foremost, both of these super-mainstream sites have taken the radical step of granting editorial input to users, namely by promoting “most popular” sections from a thrown bone to an essential element—red meat, as it were. CNN.com does so with a “top stories/most popular” choice smack in the middle of the front page; NYTimes.com, though visually more conservative, places a “most popular” tab at the top that links to a robust aggregate-user-generated page.

Next, both sites have at last made images and video a central component, with NYTimes.com taking the lead. While both had long provided non-text content, it was always supplemental and usually felt repurposed, as if they had on eye on selling the content to local TV stations—or vice versa in the case of CNN, which has long provided video from local stations. NYTimes.com has been drifting away from this model for some time and has in the last two years developed incredible web-only graphics, tutorials, photo tours, movie reviews, and mini-documentaries. With a nod to sites like Youtube and Google Video, NYTimes.com has now elevated video to its own elegant site section, video.on.nytimes.com.

Lastly, both sites, in a departure that must be hard for them, have largely abandoned the the lead-as-snippet model of previewing a story. CNN.com has done away with snippets—the one sentence blurb below a headline—altogether. NYTimes.com still has snippets, but they are now genuine encapsulations of the article’s topic, tone, and angle, rather than a reusing of the article’s lead paragraph. (Ironically perhaps, this is reminiscent of the sub-heads used in papers in the early 20th century.) Writing these snippets takes a bit more work on someone’s part, but it makes evaluating Times articles from RSS feeds and programs like Google Reader substantially easier.

The redesigns are works-in-progress, what with NYTimes.com’s offering a beta version of “My Times,” their stickiness-theory-inspired version of Yahoo and Google personalized homepages. But altogether, what do you all think of the redesigns so far? They were needed, that’s for sure. But are user-centric news sites going to be the norm? How much editorial control will they relinquish—and what will this mean for smaller news sites . . . or the web at large?

Share This

↑ Jump up to the comment form

The posts Notable Redesigns, Get Reviewed at fadtastic, ReviewMe Launched, Design View / Andy Rutledge, Client Speak, are related to this post.

Or why not take time out to find out about the author of the post.