I don’t know if anyone out there regularly reads www.stltoday.com, but up until very recently, I did. I’m somewhat of a fan of local news, and it seemed as good a place as any to get a rundown on the top local issues. But all of that changed recently when they decided to “upgrade” their website. I guess they had heard about this new fangled “Web 2.0″ thing, and had to get on the bandwagon, but what they ended up with is a shocking, embarrassing mess.
Firstly, it just looks like crap. Go. Go look at it. It is hard to put an exact finger on it, but I’ll try. Firstly, stuff seems sized incorrectly. Some text is too big, some text is too small. Some text is just where it should be, for that matter. But it is more than just the text. It seems like some of the boxes that are supposed to encapsulate similar headlines are too small, so some headlines just end up cut off.
Which brings me neatly to the damn boxes. They have decided to organize the whole page using these invisible boxes, for lack of a better term. So sports has a little box. And entertainment has a little box. But the problem is that there are no clearly defined boundaries, and so everything just mushes together like some big ugly mess of slop.
And then there is the big scrolly news thing at the top that scrolls through the 4 biggest news stories at that moment. Well in general I hate these things, because they always seem to scroll away to the next thing right as I’m about to get to the interesting part of the blurb. Stop it, web developers! No more fancy scrolly things!
My biggest problem, though, is what I’m going to call the “click bug”. It seems like whenever I want to go to click on a link, the whole damn page MOVES. So the link that I wanted to click is now just a little bit below my cursor, and so I have to click again. The second time it will work, but not the first time. Why does that happen?
I wonder if these problems are because I use Firefox exclusively, on both my Mac and work PC. But that’s not an excuse. If you are going to come up with some fancy new website, it damn well better work and look good on the 2nd biggest web browser out there.
Luckily, Stltoday seems to redo their website about once every 6 months, so hopefully I won’t have to wait long until there is something new. And honestly, probably worse.
3 Comments
I thought I was the only one that noticed. The only way that website is readable at all is through RSS. I mean, it is terrible. And rest assured that they paid someone money to design that piece of crap. Where did they get that background color, the early 90s?
It is nice to know that they managed to put two huge, content-covering flash ads on the front page though. Phew!
I concur. I have not liked the new design since it first was introduced. They should go back to the previous version as it was better.
I stopped looking at the site 5 years or so ago when they first mucked with the design. For news I like simple, clean cut. I never went back, but I’m sure it’s gone through lots of different design changes. I don’t like change, and if I shopped at Wal*Mart, I wouldn’t shop there anymore just because they’re changing their signs! I’m a litte crazy like that.