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Click on over to www.washingtonpost.com/local to take a look at the new Washingtonpost.com 'Local' homepage, which launched in Beta at 4 p.m. this afternoon. Surprisingly enough, the design actually does look significantly different from the regular home page, a far cry from previous WaPo attempts to differentiate between the local and national editions of the paper by offering minor, barely noticeable differences for online readers with local IP addresses.
Among the new features are the ability to customize which headlines and weather forecasts you see based on zip code. The site also offers a feature that should make local bloggers (us included) happy: finally, the Post's web site is aggregating local web content in a meaningful way, offering a little "Web Buzz" box with links to six or seven interesting local blog posts selected by Post editors.
I'm not sure how much I like the layout and some of the choices made here, however. Actual news stories are severely minimized, in a tiny font down the page in a narrow middle column, in favor of prominent placement for lots more flashy, interactive features and lifestyle guides up top. Does the Post think local readers don't want the major headlines?
It is helpful, though, to finally have obvious, easy to find links on the home page to Post offerings like the Going Out Guide event planner and the Get There blog. It's also nice to see that Posties are finally embracing a Beta launch like this, actually encouraging users to test it out and offer feedback instead of just putting out a finished product without going through a public testing phase. And you don't have to choose to go with this homepage: if you prefer the regular site, just don't bother changing your preferences.
What do you think of the Beta site?
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Needs headlines!! I'm not going to use a newspaper website that doesn't give me news headlines, beyond the little local box, above the fold. It's silly. I do like that they moved the content placement to the middle of the page, though, instead of the left-hand side of wide windows. Need to make that change site-wide. The ad area is waaaay too big. Takes up space that would be better served by, I don't know, news stories? I understand needing to have ads, but not on 1/3 of the page. And Firefox users block them with Adblock, anyway.
What would be really useful is customization beyond zip code or region, so you could have your local homepage show you the latest national, political, international, green, pick-your-favorite-department headlines, instead of the entertainment crap they think you want to see. This is why newspapers are dying. Why bother going to their site when I can customize my RSS feeds and get major news from Twitter, and I can't even customize my landing page for a major newspaper?
It's horrible. It is difficult to navigate, doesn't showcase any content, the grid and margins are not uniform. UGH, they actually somehow managed to change their site and make it just as bad as before.
meh. i would say bad, but the site design was already not great, so it's not like they've torpedoed something good.
Oddly similar to examiner.com...
i've always hated the WaPo website (and don't read it because of it's bad format). The new one is slightly better, but not by much. I find it really hard to read and even harder to find the information I want.
UGH! Makes me even less likely to visit than I was before.
But IMGoph is 100% correct, it's not like the wapo.com is any good to start with.
The page renders like a complete trainwreck in Camino. Horrendous.