Jun
1
2007
cnn beta
CNN.com recently debuted a beta version of their forthcoming redesign, and the more I click through it, the more I like it. It’s beautifully lean — clean, simple, easy to navigate and not weighted down by a ton of extraneous stuff.
With its red / white / gray color scheme and rounded corners, the site seems a bit CNN International - meets - Apple - meets - Adobe. It’s rather nice.
I do envy their ad situation — just one flex ad on the right (and usually a house ad at that) and, on articles, a leaderboard above the site branding and a tile at the end of the story. I wonder how / if that will change once this officially goes live.
The lean pages allow them to get away with things like having the code for both a video and a full article on the same page, yet show/hide one or the other with JavaScript — normally a recipe for page weight disaster, but here, it works surprisingly smoothly.
One thing I am surprised about: For a TV news site, CNN’s video offerings are surprisingly minimized on their home page. There’s also a disconnect between their big standalone video player, which offers lots of links to other videos (but not articles), and the display of a video within a story, packaged with its companion story and graphic.
In all, though, I think the new site a great step forward.
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Comments
It still features my biggest CNN.com complaint, though: the search bar on the top, by default, searches the web. This is counter-intuitive and downright wrong; it assumes that people who come to CNN and immediately search for a news topic will, most commonly, not want CNN.com results but instead Yahoo’s generic results. Even trickier: If a user isn’t reading the URLs their search returns, they might click on a totally new site and experience some major location confusion.
Dear CNN: Please stop assuming that people who came to your site did so because they were too dumb to go to Google or Yahoo. Thanks.
…otherwise, I like the design, but all the “blocks” make me think I should be able to customize the layout (like the fantastic new Newsvine.com redesign). Third complaint: The big top-left block is kind of baffling. A little disorganized, and full of odd elements like the ‘more stories’ arrows, which (due to placement) look like they might bring more ads instead.
I feel like such an anti-designer when I say this, but I almost preferred the old design because it was easier to browse…there was more information available with less effort, even if it didn’t look as clean. I especially miss the big block of “Sections” CNN always had; just because it allowed me to easily sort recent stories by my interests without going to a whole new page.
/rant