Recently, three news websites I have followed over the years – with different intensity of interest – have had serious relaunches, and there’s interesting stuff to note in all of them. So here are some conclusions based on a completely superficial and utterly unfair analysis, and presented in arbitrary succession:
- Magazine flirt: Is it a general trend to introduce a lighter, magazine-inspired presentation style? Most pronounced at Times Online with good photos and teasing combinations of photos, headlines and leads. At Netzeitung, the new team has softened the appearance in the direction of magazine style and introduced a lighter touch in headlines and choice of main stories, away from the old strict news format. The design relaunch itself is not complete, though. Actually that’s plus points for daring to do the changes “live”. Welt Online is the heaviest of the three, relying too much on long texts on the homepage, but some magazine elements are sneaking in here as well.
- Serendipity: Adding different elements to story pages to lure the reader to another story she might not know that she was looking for, is definitely nothing new. The “most read”, “most commented”, “most recommended” boxes should be standard now on a good site (Netzeitung lacks them, though). But some simple, but ingenious innovation is happening here. Times Online has a “Times Recommends” box that works very well.
- Readers’ comments: Allowing readers to comment on stories should also be industry standard by now, but Netzeitung is hesitating on this one as well. Welt Online does offer readers the chance to talk back, but maybe they haven’t discovered it yet, which wouldn’t be strange because they are very well hidden.
- Discovering the rest of the web: Points to Welt Online for placing a “second opinion” column on the homepage; a feed of stories from competing German news sites. Times and Welt both have a selection of blogs, which by nature are (must be) oriented towards other sites, other people’s contributions. Netzeitung has a good weekly “Blogblick” reviewing the German blog scene. But the gem here was found at Times Online: Comment Central, “Daniel Finkelstein’s rolling guide to opinion on the web”. A one-man Arts & Letters Daily? You can find such things as this chilling video. None of the three have what should also be a standard service: Links to blogs and other sites discussing the article, such as Technorati’s feature put to use by the Washington Post, among others (example).
- Becoming horizontal?: Times Online has copied the horizontal navigation of the New York Times. Welt Online is also horizontal if you go beyond the homepage, but with a vertical drop-down list to go. Netzeitung is still vertical, but that is starting to look… old. Now, I wonder when news sites will start to use more of the screen space as people buy bigger screens. Welt and Times are at the standard 1024×768 pixels, whereas Netzeitung are closer to 800×600. Well, the statistics will probably decide it. By the way, more than half of Undercurrent’s users now have higher resolutions than 1024×768 (good tool for simulating different resolutions).
- Objects in mirror may look better than before: Here’s a challenge for professional, commercial sites: What happens when blogs and other non-commercial sites start looking better and better? In the old days, standing out from individual homepages was no match for the pros. But with ready-made nicer and nicer templates for WordPress, for example? And with bloggers generally more open to readers’ comments, linking, sharing? The solution is, I hope, that terrible word content. Amateur competition forces better quality among the commercial? We can dream, and cite today’s best example: Clinton’s golden voice.
