Changing pages

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the BBC adding those little buttons to the bottom of story pages that allows users to Digg, Facebook etc a story. Doctorvee wasn’t overly impressed, not being a fan of little buttons and pointing out that the BBC shouldn’t be favouring some providers over others.

Personally I find them helpful and have used them more than once – mainly to read reaction to a story – something that isn’t available on every BBC News Online article.

But I do agree that they look a mess and should really include more than just the five providers selected by the BBC.

I use social bookmarking buttons on Up Your Ego but not in a way that looks a mess – I use the brilliant Share This plugin that lets me group them all into a neat little layer based pop-up and direct links to Digg and Del.icio.us on the right hand block of a story page.

Which brings me on to the point of this post – The Guardian.

Now gaurdian.co.uk was given a bit of a facelift a while ago but they ignored the rest of it – just the homepage. The story pages and some of the sub-indexes where left in their original form.

This wouldn’t have been a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that the once brilliant Guardian interface was now creaking under an ever increasing weight of social media tools.

It was starting to feel tired, narrow and a bit behind the times. Well they’ve finally started moving their story pages to a new design and it makes a massive difference.

As you can see from the red marked screen grab above – they’ve increased the width of the main content area, added related links near the top of the left hand navigation, kept the strong header space and made their advertising/related content column more prominent and useful.

The screen grab above shows the difference between the old content area (still active on news stories) and the new content area (that covers most of the rest of the site). The extra space makes a big difference to the comfort of reading and is similar to the leap the BBC took with News Online a couple of years ago.

The new ‘More On’ section at the top of the left hand menu seems to be a combination of direct links to hard section indexes and on the fly generated, metadata based soft indexes although I could be wrong – they might actually have an iPod index.

The bottom half of the story is where the interesting changes have come into place. Under the old style the bottom of a page would include related articles, related links, links to a photo story and sometimes outside links.

Which, in a pre social web world would have been fine – in fact any major site carrying links to other sites was a rare thing once upon a time. And related articles are always useful – but as a simple text link at the bottom of a feature it’s easy to overlook them.

This meant, more often than not – brilliant related content wouldn’t be seen – content that really adds to a story.

Under the new style this is more visual, more interactive. Social links have been added and the related content links have become more visual and highlighted.

You’ve still got the traditional ‘print version’ and ‘email’ links as have always been there – but now, instead of the Guardians own ‘Save this story’ link they’ve used the very same Share This Plugin I talked about above – the one I use on Up Your Ego and is used on MANY a blog.

Then we have the related information displayed in a visual format and broken down into specific sections. First the Related Pictures area. This is another interesting addition to the site.

Click a photo or the title of the gallery underneath the photos will will pop-up a new window with a photo story inside – this is basically a selection of photos annotated with relevant information – a useful device for telling a story and one that often has more impact than writing a 600 word article.

The photo story page also includes a More On this information box and the Share This button I mentioned before. The problem with the share this function in the pop-up (and I tried it out ont he story shown in the screen-grab above) is that it opens Digg or whatever your social net of choice is – in the pop-up instead of refering back to the original window.

Now for many this is probably ok as it keeps it self contained but if you’re looking to move on and follow the strand presented to you by Digg then it’s a pain – however they’ve probably gone for the for everyone approach.

Back to the article page now and to finish off they’ve got a great selection of related articles – things that are worth reading to broaden your knowledge of a topic a little more – they’re all grouped together at the bottom with a headline, summary, date and tags.

A nice re-design that incorporates a selection of modern web features without going over the top – although the ability to comment on news stories and maybe pulling in related blog posts would have given the Guardian back the edge they used to have.

However I can understand why they wouldn’t want to have commenting on EVERY story – it would be expensive, offensive and horrific to moderate.

So now we’ve had new looks from The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail (hate the paper but one of the better websites) and the Express.

I know The Mirror has also had a re-design but to me it was a step backwards – some nice ideas but all badly implemented and The Sun has been gradually adding new features and I’m sure they’re great but a few too many tits for me.

So that really only leaves The Independent in the UK newspaper list of websites that needs a new look – the current design is simple and elegant but too narrow for modern monitors and a bit clunky.

I’m working on another post for the TV and Radio news sites to go up sometime next week but I’ve already commented on the fact that the BBC could do with a new look for news online – something that isn’t an evolution but a whole new branch of creation