Times Site Redesign Shaped by the Web

The most-hyped site redesign in years has to be the updated look of the New York Times. With the new design, the Times is making a lot of significant assumptions: that visitors have large monitors; that people can navigate dense, confusing layouts; that multimedia bandwidth is not a major problem anymore; and that mainstream sites need to incorporate user input.

When the paper sometimes known as the "Old Gray Lady" is making these assumptions, it's safe to assume that these ideas are going mainstream.

NYT Goes Wide

The first impression of the new site is that it imitates the look of a newspaper. The layout is built for 1024x768 screen resolution, putting an index of the major site sections along the left and using four columns to provide news highlights.

The most important content still fits in an 800x600 pixel screen, but the design basically assumes that users are running at 1024x768 or higher screen resolutions.

The NYT home page is also designed to be browsed, not read. While the print version of the paper features complete articles, or at least lengthy intros, the website provides only headlines and short summaries. This may be the influence of sites like Google News, which are designed to make it easy to scan and find news you're interested in.

Across the top of the new site, there is another navigation element that provides alternate views of the site's content:

* Today's Paper mirrors what's in the printed paper, and provides calendar-based navigation

* Video makes it easy to find the sites' multimedia content;

* Most Popular provides a Top 10-list window into the site

* Topics - Provides a topical index of the site, along with a list of currently popular topics.

* My Times is a personalized view of the site

The New York Times is using the increased space on its home page to provide a broader window into the content of the site.

Crazy Dense & Confusing

The new version of the Times site is also busy to the point that it is confusing, at first. It's been Yahoo'd.

Yahoo has long had one of the densest home pages on the Web. It has remained easy-to-use, though, because sections are clearly separated by color blocks, and because the site has evolved very slowly over time, so you know where to look for news headlines and you know where to click to get to various services.

The Times site initially seems chaotic, with information spread out all over a huge amount of space (about three screens at 1024x768). The layout may have an underlying philosophy, but it appears random on first view. For example, there are five links for the Science scattered around the home page.

The Times is flattening their navigation, making it broad instead of deep, and bubbling up as much information to the top level that they can.

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