Flippy - I Rant, You Read
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Idiot of the Day - The New Design of HuffingtonPost.com
This was my homepage - http://www.huffingtonpost.com Now, it’s a jumbled ugly flashing ad-ridden mess. I don’t think I’ve ever so hated a site redesign. Every time I attempt to go back thinking, “Maybe it isn’t that bad”, I’m wrong. It is that bad. The ads are the horrible cheesy waterfall screensaver ads, the flashing Capital One ads, the dumb free game ads. I expected so much better. The site before was so clean. For god’s sake, Arianna Huffington is a multi-millionaire, she couldn’t get some text ad sponsors? She couldn’t get George Soros to chip in and keep it ad-free? She couldn’t afford someone who had an eye for design? Just blech, blech, blech! Last night when they were doing the changeover and the site was full of error messages, I thought it had been hacked. At least if it had been hacked, then the database and design would’ve been restored. It’s worse. Someone hit it with an internet uglystick.
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oh my GAWD. my eyes are bleeding from content overload.
shmoopee poopee on 08/18 at 05:29 PM -
Isn’t it frightening? I so hate to give up on the site, but it really hurts me to look at it now.
on 08/18 at 09:24 PM -
I was just there and saw one banner ad on the top and a box ad on the side. Neither are flashing. I hate flashing ads.
If they can cover their costs or make a small profit from ads then that’s what they should do.
It shouldn’t matter how well off the owner of the site is. They’re providing content that’s worth the aggravation.Silent Leanne on 08/20 at 03:38 AM -
All of the banner ads I’ve seen there are animated, which drives me crazy. I find it difficult to read when stuff is moving near my paragraphs. There’s also a big animated ad in the stories and on the comments page. I would be fine if the ads were text or didn’t move.
The redesign also has too much information all jumbled up into too many columns.
I have no problem with them making a profit, but I do have a problem with a redesign that’s meant to hinder reading in order to get ad clicks. If it was some high school kid trying to make pocket change, yes, I would have a different opinion about it. Arianna can sell ads and she can make those ads both desirable for the advertiser *and* the consumer. It doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. And yes, I do think that if you’re a multi-millionaire and you want a site that is as accessible as possible (people have also complained that it scrolls left to right on 800x600 displays), you should pay good money to a team that can do it properly, with as much input from your readers as possible. They could have done mock-ups of a couple different designs and let people vote. After all, what that site depends on is participation and engaging people in discussions, whether its the celebrity blogs or the news stories.
I still find it painful to go there and now the time I spend there is very brief.
on 08/20 at 08:01 PM
