We finally got our Lawrence Journal-World website redesign out the door. There is still much left to do, but it’s live and working. The design work here was led by Nathan Borror, with support from Christian Metts, and I personally think it’s brilliant. It’s much cleaner and less cluttered than most newspaper websites, and I think the readability on the site is really, really good. One of my favorite features, as a user of the site, is the new “everything we published today” feature. Unlike most online newspaper archives, this accounts not only for new stories, but also for blog entries, podcasts, photos, galleries, videos, and more.
Like I said, there’s still a lot to do to get LJWorld.com where we want it, but getting this out the door is 90% of the battle. We completely redesigned the site using much cleaner HTML and CSS than before, and we’ve (finally) migrated our own site to use all the latest Ellington goodies our clients have been using for a while now. We’ve set ourselves up for much, much faster iterative development — both from a functionality and design perspective — so we can roll more new stuff our more quickly.
001 // Scott McCracken // 04.29.2007 // 6:58 PM
Beautiful—both the front end development and under the hood. The lack of overall clutter is truly remarkable, I found myself clicking through local stories just because I enjoyed the improved readability. There’s quite a bit of interesting stuff going on around Lawrence! It’s been fun to watch you guys use that new grid so effectively, well done all-around.
002 // Wilson Miner // 04.29.2007 // 7:23 PM
I’ve said it already, but the redesign looks great. I know how much work it was to get that one right, and the results are outstanding. Good work guys.
003 // Oliver Beattie // 04.30.2007 // 11:43 AM
Beautiful work by the whole team!
It’s really nice to see Django (or it, anyway) used in such creative ways by such talented people. This is a really brilliant example of how a design which is perfect for its use (i.e. uncluttered, ‘gets out of the way’ of the content, etc.) and really creative uses of content & programming can come together in an absolutely perfect harmony!
004 // Ben Otero // 04.30.2007 // 1:13 PM
The grid is great and the content is so clear. Finding the search input and weather on most newspaper sites is a burden. Making that easy to find alone is a great step ahead of most news sites.
I’m curious about the minimal ads the home page. As a reader, it’s great. How did that go over with the suits?
005 // Jeff Croft // 05.01.2007 // 9:30 AM
@Ben: In general, the minimal ads doesn’t bother “the suits” too much. They understand that it’s all cyclical. By keeping our readers happy, we keep people on the site, which is better for advertisers, which sells more ads. A few points about our advertising philosophy:
Also, we believe: More ads isn’t better. Better ads is better. We’d rather have one or two great, seductive, sexy spots per page than 15 small flashing ads competing with one another. One or two nice big ads are much more likely to be noticed and clicked than one of 15 tiny ones. It sometimes takes some explaining for advertisers to understand this, but it almost always works out better for them in the long run.
006 // Grant Blakeman // 05.02.2007 // 12:53 AM
this redesign is phenomenal - well done