Think.
full archivesI think a lot—some say too much. Behold the results… a collection of my random, scattered thoughts. Pardon the dust, I'm tinkering with the layout in my spare time.
Posted on Tuesday, 29 June 2010
MSNBC rethinks news pages
Mike Davidson on MSNBC’s story page revamp:
This weekend, msnbc.com launched a sweeping redesign of the most important part of their site: the story page. The result is something unlike anything any other major news site is offering and is a bold step in a direction no competitor has gone down (yet): the elimination of pageviews as a primary metric.
From a strategy POV, I love this. A few years back, when I was trying to get my first job in Seattle, I met the MSNBC team. This was right before they brought out their newer, much better looking colour-spectrum site design. I think what killed my chances, at the time, was the fact I was so strongly against the cognitive break caused by the inline ads and pagination on most news sites. Well, that or my smell.
It’s interesting to see this change happen. Granted, there are still some jarring ads that break the story text in half (and raise my ire), but by and large it’s a huge step forward for readers.
There are some stylistic oddities (Crofty makes a great point in the comments about the measure and the oddly floating headline) but I have a feeling they’ll get tweaked into something better over time.
