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

flip the switch

After a long process that felt, in my uneducated view, a little like childbirth, the long-awaited redesign to NAA.org, Web site of the Newspaper Association of America, launched this afternoon.

The main goals of this project were to 1) make both featured and archived content easier to find and 2) from a visual standpoint, make the site more appealing and better representative of NAA’s mission.

This is really only a partial site redesign: The home page and overall look have changed, but much of the overall structure, particularly on the section pages, has remained the same. (The scope of the redesign was established before I started working at NAA.) It’s not perfect, and there are certainly bugs to work out, but my hope is that it’s a definite improvement in terms of both design and organization.

That feeling of having gone through a painful yet ultimately rewarding ordeal isn’t unique to the NAA redesign experience, but rather is an almost familiar friend, after having gone through the redesign process for several large sites over the years. It’s a process that is at times frustrating and exhilarating, and at the end, one hopes, the resulting product is something that you can be proud of, and that other people will appreciate.

By the end of a redesign, after having toiled for weeks or months to get things together, I’m so ready to have the new site out there that the relief and excitement pretty well balance out the wary knowledge of inevitable tweaks and tinkering that will be needed in the weeks ahead. The official site launch isn’t the end of the redesign process, but, for me, it’s probably the most satisfying part of the whole ordeal.