Welcoming New York Times to the modern Web

Bloggers have spent the last few days analyzing the new look of the New York Times' Web site, which launched on Sunday. A note from Editor-in-Chief Leonard M. Apcar said the paper's goal was to simplify their pages, improve navigation, feature new multimedia elements, increase personalization and take advantage of the larger monitors being used by more Web readers. For the most part, bloggers are positive about the changes they see. Slate.com's Jack Shafer gushed over the site, saying the redesign was so good it was forcing him to cancel his subscription to the paper copy.

The paper's site redesign comes at a good time. A study released Monday said that traffic to newspapers' Web sites climbed dramatically last year. Unique users to newspaper sites went up by 21 percent, while page views went up by 43 percent from January to December 2005. With more users visiting more frequently, it will be critical for newspapers to make their sites user friendly, or risk losing them to competitors and other news sources.

Blog community response:

"The new design oddly enough looks like...a newspaper! Whoah and behold. Does it make sense for the web? Will others follow? Imitators will surely come forth, but this massive canvas brings some serious design challenges--keeping focus where it needs to be through scale, position, color and contrast; organizing the page sensibly; considering what should be "above the fold" and where the fold is (if it even matters any more)."
--Amphetameme.org

"Problems aside, I believe the new design will help the site draw attention to the rich media content it more energetically promotes. It is also somewhat easier to read and navigate at all levels, including articles.

The New York Times brand managers probably insist that the site take on as much of the character of the paper as possible. I can understand where this design approach came from, more so because it's The Times than when I see similar newspaper.coms from less storied print brands. At its heart, though, the "gray lady" look makes the site seem tedious to process. To me that's a big problem."
--Small Initiatives--Sensitible Internet Design

"There's a few lessons for bloggers to learn from the redesign, as well as some evidence that the Times itself has been learning from bloggers...But the blog influence on the Times isn't just limited to issues like screen real estate or the team behind the scenes, it's visible in the aesthetic and the content of the new site as well. Like the recent redesign of New York Magazine (spearheaded by longtime bloggers), which has frequently been described as looking blog-like. There's a clear, open aesthetic, with lots of white space and a link-rich footer to help guide you around the site."
--Six Apart

"All the people I've read have been cooing over the new NYTimes.com design, but...I don't like it. I don't think the world is ready for 1000 pixel wide Web pages. I get complaints from clients if I work on something and it turns out at 850 pixels wide, because they're running at 800x600 or whatever. What's more, those of us with higher resolutions don't necessarily run our browsers at large sizes. Mine tends to be around 1000 pixels, but I have a widescreen display. Secondly, check out all those columns and all that clutter. It reminds me of the ICQ homepage back in the day. I don't know where to begin and/or why to look at the stuff around the edges."
--Peter Cooper