Makeover at The New York Times
The New York Times
launched a redesigned website a few minutes ago. Many of the changes are
subtle, but they’ve added a few new features which I really appreciate.
First, they now have a dedicated area of the site to show video clips. And
more importantly, they have a “most
popular” area that includes most emailed, most blogged, and most
searched articles. I like the direction The Times is going – and I
also note
that they are now experimenting with linking to blog posts directly from
articles.
Some of the changes and new features you’ll see are a refreshed look,
streamlined navigation, expanded use of video and other multimedia, and
better ways to see what other readers are looking at, searching for and
talking about.
How long before they display blog content directly within NYTimes.com,
perhaps via blogburst?
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Food for thought if you believe adding lots of content is important to a
website. It is important from a search engine perspective, but
remember, sites are intended for human readers. It’s easy to overwhelm
someone with too many choices and too many paths.
Providing this kind of summary information (most popular, most
emailed, most blogged, and most searched articles) is a good next step for
those of us with a lot of material on our websites. Let’s consider that our
responsibility to the readers goes beyond just piling more subject matter
into the site, whether it comes from contributors, visitors or
ourselves. We need to help each reader figure out where to
insert themselves into the volume of text that is blossoming so rapidly
at sites with blogs and user-generated content.
Tom
