Critique of Web designs

Detroit News

Cole: The first site I'm going to talk about is The Detroit News. I think what we're going to find here is some agreements and some disagreements. I should point out that this site came up 24 hours after a strike was called by unionized workers at the Detroit newspapers. This had been a prototype until the strike. Nevertheless, the design is very, very good. There's no question that they've elected to avoid talking to the remaining 20 percent of people who are not Netscape enhanced. They use tables, and they use a lot of good table of contents areas in here. You can pick a section like Accent and come up with nice descriptive text, nice little heads. I find this site to be very, very good content and I think that it's a good, good example of taking existing print content and moving it easily to the Web. We'll be talking about some shovelware later on, but I find this site to be very, very comfortable, very easy to work around in. So navigation buttons are good: "the next story," "return to the homepage" buttons at the top of each story make this a very easy site to navigate in. The sections are broken down on this front page, plus as we scroll down at the bottom, we come up with sections that are not from the daily newspaper, but developed exclusively for the on-line section. Here we have this Siberia section. You actually have to look at something called "Ask Cyber Dweeb." We take a look and somebody asks Cyber Dweeb how to get a cool Internet address, and Cyber Dweeb answers you better not try to fill out the Internet forms yourself. So there's a good mixture of both material out of the daily paper, and material that has been created exclusively for the Web. I think it's really well designed, and I'm really, really comfortable with this. So what do you think Rosalind?

Resnick: I'm not sure I'm as excited about it as you are David. It is well designed and they are going in the right direction. I don't know if Cyber Dweeb is the be-all and end-all of content, but at least it's some new content that they've developed for the Web. But overall the site is basically shovelware. Say what you want about re-purposing, I don't think that newspapers that simply shovel content on the Web are going to attract readers. I think that most people will come to this site and surf on.

Seybold: I'm curious now, give me your comparison between Nando and Detroit.

Resnick: Nando has content that is very rich and very deep. Yes, there is some print content from The News And Observer on there, but at the same time, they have their sports servers, they have the create your own sports server, they have the Syrano server. They have a lot of cool interactive stuff that you don't find in their print publication. Even though they're not as well designed as this, I give Nando a better rating.

Seybold: David?

Cole: I think that there's no question that Nando has got some material that's better than what Detroit is putting up. But I think that in terms of commitment of staff and resources, they're doing an excellent, excellent job in Detroit, all things considered.

Seybold: That's something you can say because you know what they're putting into it. The typical person on the Web would not know that.

Cole: I don't disagree with that. But once again, I think that we're in a new medium, and part of what we bring to the party as reviewers is some background information.

Seybold: I expect more from an on-line newspaper than an electronic version of the print product. I probably expect different things from different papers. I would probably expect different things from an on-line New York Times than from an on-line Detroit News. But, this to me is less far along, that migration path I was talking about than Nando is.

Cole: As I said, this has only been up six, eight weeks now, so there's definitely some issues about what they've learned in Raleigh that they haven't learned in Detroit.

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