Web Management@Ramblin’ Prose

After two years of News-Record.com’s last redesign, we’re in the midst of another. I’ll probably reference the changes we’re making as we continue down this road, but for now, I think I’ll say this: The first redesign came at a time of great change, of moving to a new content system, and probably wasn’t the best idea at the time. I was only tangentally involved, seeing a mockup of the design after it was pretty much headed down the road of implementation.

Let me say I hope we don’t follow that same path.

I came across these Top Ten Mistakes of Web Management from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox. The essay is old, 1997 old. But it speaks to Web managers, designers and developers today.

The third “mistake” listed is: Letting the Site Structure Mirror Your Orgchart. For newspaper professionals, it should read: Letting the Site Structure Mirror Your Newspaper. The Web offers so much more than the printed page yet many sites use navigation that pays homage to the way things used to be. The paper provides the reader serendipity — one can scan and refer back to articles of interest. But the Web can be so much deeper, linking in and out of your site and bringing a richness of experience you can’t get from print.

For example, The New York Times began its redesign with the article page and not with an overall site revamp. Why? Speed and depth.

We needed to fix the article page, because people were coming into the article page and leaving the site, so we decided that since we really couldn’t move fast enough on the site redesign, we did the article page as a one-off in 2005.

That was Len Apcar, editor of the New York Times website, in a Q&A with Online Journalism Review last year.

Apcar goes on to say that newspaper design and Web design have certain similarities but some significant differences. The similarities include a “simple clean logical experience” and the addition of elegance makes it all the better.

The differences?

… you want a magnetism to a webpage. You want to bring a reader close in and hold them there and give them a reason to go deep. Because you are asking a reader not to read headlines and captions and pictures — to get involved in text, you are asking them to read and click and keep clicking and dig deeper in the site, in layers. And when that happens, that’s what I call the essential magnetism of a successful webpage design.

We’re experiencing that very problem. Time spent on the site is brief. Our site’s goal should be to keep people there and keep them coming back. We’re not there yet. But we have time to make it happen.