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

newspaper web site redesigns

Three newspaper Web sites have launched or previewed redesigns recently:

• MaineToday.com this month launched a redesign homepage. (Pointed out on Poynter’s Online-News listerv.)
• The Baltimore Sun this week introduced a new look. The design is pretty clean and straightforward, and they’ve introduced community-oriented features such as article comments and photo / video sharing.
• The Chicago Tribune has a preview of its coming redesign … and it looks just like the Baltimore Sun. I guess this means that the Tribune Company (which owns both papers) is standardizing the design of its Web sites. Also worth noting: It appears that the Chicago Tribune is going from using its newspaper gothic type banner as its main logo to using a more basic sans-serif treatment of the site url, with a smaller version of the newspaper logo underneath and the words “web edition.” (washingtonpost.com takes a similar approach to its branding, albeit without the words “web edition.”)