The North County Times or NC Times launched a redesign of their site, and while I am no design expert I have criticized the functionality of their site in the past. It’s important then to revisit past criticisms and to see what the upgraded site has to offer.
My biggest complaint with the NC Times and the other newspapers is the walled garden approach they have taken with their content. Not only do they lock down the distribution of the content they create but the content that users on the site create in response. They do this to preserve ad revenue, but in the end they are competing against services who have figured out how to monetize content through syndication.
Results of my initial 5 minute evaluation are not good. While the site loads much faster and has an updated more modern look to it, the usability is poor because of the large type reducing the amount of content available without clicking or scrolling. This is exacerbated by the large amount of space reserved for ads and the masthead. While the large drop down auto-dealership banner advertisement is gone, and the site no longer crashes my mobile browser, the site still does not support alternative browsing via mobile devices in any real sense. On my phone I need to scroll halfway down the page before I get to the headline for the story.
The site now has breadcrumbs that improve navigation and the new menu bar navigation is cleaner than the old style, however key pages that were very useful are as far as I can tell completely gone. One I will specifically miss is the regional columnists page that provided at a glance the subject and date of each columnists most recent post.
RSS feeds appear to be the same clunky system that existed before. One really odd behavior is that the RSS icon on each section home page links to an RSS explanation page rather than being an actual RSS link. Of course they also didn’t bother to put RSS links in their page headers.
One of the most important features of the modern newspaper website is the ability to handle trackbacks and pingbacks. It will be interesting to see if this review is linked back to the comments for the announcement of the web site redesign. One really foolish thing that was done was to remove the comments from the story page itself into an alternate tab. Separating the comments from the story is one symptom of the newspaper arrogance that their content is somehow better than user generated comment.
One really weird aspect of the site that I find interesting occurs on the homepage. At the bottom of the main column appear objects that look like widgets providing a glimpse into each of the main sections.
This content appears on the home page and looks like a widget.
Unfortunately this content is not dynamic, clicking on any of the hyperlinks result not in the expected dynamic preview behavior of a widget, but an actual navigation to the story or section clicked.
While there are some positive things about the redesign, overall the NC Times took some steps backwards in usability and did not fix some fundamental technology problems. I believe this change will be yet another milestone marking the decline of the North County’s most important media asset.
Update:
As expected pingbacks and trackbacks do not register as comments. However we were informed that a mobile site exists:
ACE said on: August 5, 2009, 5:58 pm
We do have a mobile-optimized site at http://www.nctimes.com/mobile. It is not a default for mobile devices out of respect for iPhone users, who would then be limited to it. If you have mobile problems, let us know at website@nctimes.com. — Ace
While I agree that auto-detection can be problematic, I guess that the NC Times creators have never seen pages for m.twitter.com and other professional web sites. If you look at the bottom of http://m.twitter.com you will find a line that says, “View Twitter in: ” with a button that toggles between ‘Standard’ and ‘Mobile’. While the lack of RSS feeds pointing to the mobile site is problematic, the nonstandard use of a subdirectory versus a subdomain is inane, the most wrong headed part of their mobile site is a complete lack of advertising.
