It’s apparently media redesign season around the District. City Paper recently overhauled their long-time print look, and we began switching our look this weekend. (By the way: thanks for your patience, dear readers!) Not to be outdone, the Washington Post has also taken the leap, revamping their website over the weekend. The new design employs a lot more open space and feels less cluttered, but definitely has its share of issues.
The basics? Well, the Post’s website now revolves around four content hubs — Politics, Opinions, Local and Sports — with everything else tucked in behind. The real beef of the update is found in the site’s multimedia and interactive features: there’s video everywhere you look in the redesign, and the site promises that “each morning, your news intake starts with a new video on the day’s top local stories and features.” There’s an enhanced commitment to interaction too — take for example, the paper’s soccer hub, on which video, a national Twitter feed, a Facebook widget and the new “Post Most” popularity scale occupy a good portion of the non-advertising real estate, or the PostLocal hub, where photo galleries are given their own dedicated space. (We’re also told that the website will be handing out badges in order to increase the quality of its notoriously ranting commenters, which should be…interesting.) The new today’s paper feature is, at the least, a curious bridge between the Post’s paper and web offerings, and the generally larger focus on images in articles is a welcome upgrade.
There are some odd design choices, though. The Post moved the addresses of several of its blogs’ RSS feeds — meaning that if you were reading Ezra Klein, Rob Pegoraro or Click Track, you might need to double check your reader — which sounds like an unnecessary pain for readers. The Post’s local music coverage, which is, by all accounts, one of the most reliably solid aspects of the paper, is no longer on the main navigation tab. Additionally, the decision to hide photo credit captions (which are only visible after clicking a button) is strange, to say the least.
