Comments on: Guardian Website Gets (Partial) Redesign

By: Ciaran

Ciaran — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 18:00:32 +0000

@Jan - this post was actually about last year’s, much less radical, redesign. I’ve got some thoughts on the new one (including the lack of a football link) and will be posting about it in more detail soon.

By: Jan Hargreaves

Jan Hargreaves — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 09:12:44 +0000

I guess i’m the only person who thinks the new design is absolutely terrible. everything is really large like i’m looking through some bifocals. (yes i know you can change the text size but it doesnt change the spacing). white space IS A GOOD THING on a newspaper site. it helps the eye focus on particular elements on a page, and is easier to read. with the new design the eye is just lost. sorry but the home page just looks like a complete mess.

i love going to the sections not formatted yet, its much easier to read. BUT HANG ON, today we lose the link to football on the homepage. what is going on??? it just gets worse and worse. another rant - you can’t view the results of polls without first voting? stupid.

why the multi coloured links at the top that was introduced today? is this a children’s website? i thought it was for intelligent people with liberal views who don’t want bling.

By: Ciarán

Ciarán — Wed, 16 May 2007 07:09:58 +0000

Thanks for the reply Neil - I certainly have no great desire to see the old home page back.

Like I said, I worked in online publishing for 7 years and can certainly appreciate the hige amount of worked in a redesign of this size, especially when it involved changes or updates to back-end content management systems. I still get nightmares about some of the relaunches I was involved in, often involving upwards of 40,000 articles and similar numbers of jobs or other content.

I guess that I just see The Guardian as such a shining example of online publishing, that I expect more of you than I do of other sites. It’s a burden that I’d guess you’re happy to bear…

By: Ash

Ash — Mon, 14 May 2007 20:20:41 +0000

Thanks for the interesting post, and imagine my suprise when i find a reply from the Guardian themselves!

I do find the partial rollout very peculiar though but can understand the reasoning based on the level of work required.

By: Neil McIntosh

Neil McIntosh — Mon, 14 May 2007 17:56:03 +0000

Thanks for your comments, and it’s good you like the new front page. Sorry the rest of the site doesn’t meet the expectations set by the front page, but at least you’re not longing for the old look
The key to the thinking behind the gradual roll-out is that we can do a (hopefully) really good job with each bit of the site, with a new CMS and the use of CSS (which isn’t widely used on the site at the moment) then relaunch it, rather than a huge big bang which imposes a one-size-fits-all look and leaves a huge laundry list of tweaks and bugfixes. This isn’t only a design job - it’s a huge technical and editorial job too.

There’s also an ugly history of botched full site relaunches among online newspapers; these are huge, complex, content-packed sites, and relaunches place huge strains on infrastructure and people.

Bear with us… we’ll get there in the end
(Neil McIntosh, head of editorial development @ Guardian Unlimited)