Those of you who clicked onto Courant.com this afternoon saw that it has undergone a transformation.
The Courant.com staff has been knocking itself out recently, putting the final touches on the relaunch. It was delayed by about a day.
The most noticeable change is the switch to “horizontal navigation,” meaning that the lefthand rail has been moved to the horizontal strip on top, under the redesigned banner. The additional width will give the designers more flexibility and options on how to arrange pages. A lot of other navigational links now appear at the bottom of the home page, out of the way.
Also, the iTowns format has changed. Rather than a structure based on six regions or zones, the emphasis will be on individual towns. Each will have its own main page. The “web hosts” assigned to most zones will be returned to more traditional local reporting, which, under the existing constraints, probably makes sense, especially since there will be more time and effort devoted to producing local news.
The Courant.com staff has also improved the way the reader-submitted material appears on the town pages. This will reduce the amount of searching readers need to do for their material, and will probably offset any loss of personality the pages suffer when the web hosts move on.
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The new site nav seems ok, but the new logo is an eyesore — exactly the sort of thing someone with a “Learn Photoshop in 24 Hours” book would churn out — but only if they stopped at the chapter about the Gradient Tool.
Not surprisingly, it looks like it was designed by a committee, with everything on the page jockeying for position and screaming “Me too!” It looks even more now like an overfilled closet, with all the valuable stuff piled on the top shelf and the rest dumped on the floor or pushed in the corners. The strangest thing about it is that under the hopelessly chaotic design, there actually appears to have been an effort to organize the content (evident in the navigation bar, for example) — perhaps by the one person on the committee who actually had a vision. However determined the effort was, it was lost in committee — and in the graphics department. What exactly is the basic concept behind the design? Cubism? Adstract expressionism? All in all, it’s as much of a jumbled mess as the previous Courant.com, and equally as ad-infested, celebrity-centered and fatuously full of fluff. Love the Weird News under News — all part of the cynical effort to dumb down the Courant (or what remains of the Courant). Putting the classifieds on the top, too — now there’s an inspiration. Why not just provide a handy link to craigslist and spare us the death throes of that section?
Here’s a fun activity under “Things to Do”: Try to find a link to today’s front page on the Courant’s newly redesigned municipal solid waste and recycling site. Maybe it’s under “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.” Or could it be listed as gone, under 2009 Notable Deaths? Perhaps under Items for Sale? I just don’t know.
i followed about a dozen links and landed on half a dozen pages that didn’t load, or didn’t load properly. is it my browser (safari 4)? or corporate passive-aggressive behavior triggered when, during the registration process, i admitted to not being a print subscriber? (luckily, i was able to read deb hornblow’s piece on lobster, even though the left margin ate up the width of a couple of characters.)