Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

foxnews.com redesign

Poynter’s Jim Romenesko pointed out this morning that FoxNews.com launched a site redesign today. According to a story in today’s Wall Street Journal, the site was designed in-house, and with a strong interest in attracting high-profile advertisers. (“Fox News Redesigns Site With Advertisers in Mind” - 06/14/04)

Admittedly, it doesn’t take me very long to jump on my “Why I Hate FoxNews” soapbox, but, without even getting into the content, I have some serious issues with its new design:

• The site takes an unconscionably long time to load. They very may well still be working out the kinks with the changeover, but it’s still ridiculous.
• Visually, the site looks like it was designed in PowerPoint, from the animated menus on the right to the extensive use of gradients. This is not a good thing.
• The menus on the right take far too long to expand. I’m generally not a big fan of these anyway because, if not done properly, they cause problems for people who don’t have JavaScript turned on or who are using old browsers.
• Speaking of browsers, I don’t think the site was extensively browser tested (it crashes Netscape 4 / PC for me, and a friend reported that it crashed his copy of Firefox). Four words: “Designing with Web Standards.” (And speaking of Web standards, the W3C HTML validator can’t read the home page.)
• The site was definitely not designed with accessibility concerns in mind. The home page is incomplete and difficult to read in Lynx. Meanwhile, text-resizing is out for Internet Explorer / PC users, as the designers have defined their font sizes in pixels rather than in points or ems (which means IE’s built-in “increase/decrease text size” feature doesn’t work) and haven’t included a separate “increase/decrease text size” feature to compensate.

I’ll be curious to see how (or if) the site will evolve to respond to feedback about the redesign. With their stated desire (per the WSJ article) to focus more heavily on video / multimedia content, maybe they should consider looking at what more technology-forward Web operations like ESPN.com have done to balance out the competing demands of rich media content, page load time, users with various browser types and means of access, advertiser concerns, etc.