The Boston Herald up-tabloids its web site, but has some way to go
The Boston Herald has redesigned the newspaper’s web site. I like the addition of colors and pictures, but wish more or less everything simply had been presented in one top-to-bottom flow on the front page, with the most dramatic story first. That’s how most Nordic tabloid web sites are organized and since they are among the world-leaders in revenue generation among newspaper websites I imagine it would make sense to copy them.
Instead, the new design has this nice-looking navigation plate on the front page - below a very fat header with 24 links and a search box and an over-there-in-the-corner ad - which requires four mouse-clicks to check out the top news for Sports, Entertainment, gossip, and Business. Four mouse clicks but not a single money-making element. That’s odd. The Nordic model, by contrast, is scroll-centric with plenty of money-makers interspersed with links to news articles. Norwegian-owned Swedish tabloid and Internet pioneer Aftonbladet is a good example.
I miss the box with the most viewed and emailed stories. That box teased many unearned clicks out of me.
One detail I do like on BostonHerald.com is the placement of ads on second-level pages so that when you click a “Next” link to go to the start of the copy on page 2 of the story without having to look at the site’s header.
And look how fast the page loads according to these numbers at the bottom of the page: 0.183423! That information is news you can use.
What I definitely don’t like about the new design is it’s uber-use of JavaScript and - I suppose - Web 2.0 features that throw my browser’s back button off completely.
The site has an “Upgrade Center” page with links to the latest versions of browsers and plug-ins. That might a good page to affiliate-market (yes, that’s a verb) virus protection programs. Just saying.
Early Sunday morning on Labor Day weekend is a good time to launch a redesign, btw.
