ENN has been around for years.
So has its current design (or at least I get that feeling)
I don’t have any issues with the current design, though I don’t get exactly excited about it either.
They’re currently preparing to unveil a new design, but have made the new design available for everyone to see in advance.
That’s a brave move to make!
In any case the new design is very different from the current site.
In some ways that is a very good thing, however it’s not in others.
Let’s examine it a bit more closely.
Basic Accessibility
Both the current and new versions of the site are usable using a text-based browser (lynx). The new one is slightly easier to get around, however.
HTML Validation
The old version does not validate and neither does the new version.
The old version of the site made full use of the screen real estate, but the new one has loads of white space around it.
On a lower screen resolution it probably looks ok, but on my monitor it just looks plain silly
There are also some really odd design decisions that break usability.
The story titles are bolded, but they’re not hyperlinked (even SiliconRepublic managed to get that right!), so you have to click on the “more” link to actually get to the story.
In common with so many sites these days, they’ve added “web 2.0” elements so that you can “digg” stories directly from the page and they’ve also given their RSS feeds greater prominence.
From an SEO perspective, however, they’ve really missed the point and seem to have regressed. All the news stories have the same page title! I won’t even start on the filenames!
It’s a shame that they didn’t address some of those issues, but maybe they will before the site actually goes live.
Michele Neylon :: Pensieri
Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts
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The SEO angle would be easy enough to sort out as the site is database driven. (From what I remember, it is a Postgresql / tcl combination.) The main issue from an SEO point of view is the lack of original content. Most of the content on ENN seems to be press releases recycled as news or feeds from other publications. The duplicate content filters could kick in if the headlines were written into the URLs.
The design is very derivative in its use of whitespace. Most news type websites seem to use an whitespace based approach though few have really emulated the http://www.news.com fluid design approach properly. ENN’s switch from an almost single column design for the main text to an almost crowded centre area might be a bit distracting and the content may be swamped by the adverts. The dead grey areas framing the page are a lost opportunity for advertising.
Where’s the link to the new layout? 🙂
To be honest the look of the old website didn’t bother me too much. what did annoy me was the very slow load times, the frequent outages due to a borked database, and the lack of a year in the article datestamp, which made searching nearly useless because you’ve no idea of the age of your results.
Gary
http://test.enn.ie
Michele