subscribeSeriously, Madison.com?
by dusty on Sep.03, 2009 , under Uncategorized
When I worked at the newspaper, I would occasionally sneak a chuckle at the little old men that would write letters complaining about changes in the paper’s format. I was endlessly amazed at the things they could come up with to be angry about. The paper isn’t wide enough any more! The type is shrinking! It doesn’t lay on the table the way it used to! I would shake my head and wonder aloud, “It still brings the news, doesn’t it? Are these guys just looking for reasons to complain?”
Well buy me a walker and prop some bifocals up on my nose, because I am full of nothing but piss and vinegar about the latest redesign Madison’s most popular news website has undergone.
Now in my defense, my biggest complaint with the new madison.com is that half the time, I can’t get to the news at all. While the redesign is actually pretty sharp-looking from an aesthetic standpoint, having a slick background image and an iPod-inspired navigation bar does me no good if the website crashes my computer. It’s not a problem when I’m on my own equipment, but the computer I have at my place of employment runs an out-of-date version of Internet Explorer on Windows 2000. I can barely check my Gmail on that machine.
This is an oft-overlooked concern for many web designers, who find it hard to fathom that 90 percent of the computing public doesn’t invest the money and effort that they do in keeping their computer up-to-date and running well. I don’t have any numbers to back me up, but I’d feel safe in guessing madison.com’s new website framework leaves anywhere between 15 and 30 percent of their former readership in the technological dust.
Alienating any segment of their regular crowd is a dangerous move in an industry that’s more or less bending over backwards to expand readership.
It’s part of a larger problem that editors from outside the Internet generation are having a tough time wrapping their heads around — the failure to realize that fancy-pants bells and whistles are no substitute for content, and easy access to it. They get it into their heads that they need to be cutting edge, but they have no idea what that entails. They don’t know what they want, but they want it to be the latest.
I speak from experience, having once sat across a desk from a manager who told me he wanted me to head up the launch of a new website to display some of our news content. When I asked him what kind of content we would populate it with, he replied, “It needs to be really web 2.0.”
I’m certain he read that term somewhere.
It’s clear that the new madison.com was designed with flash as a higher priority than function. Never mind that the rolling “top stories” with pictures and live comment feeds attached to links crash my work computer. Even on my rig at home, where the site runs fine, they still take up far too much space, are completely unnecessary and bury the content so it’s harder to find.
That was the beauty of the old madison.com. It may not have been particularly pretty, but I could log onto the website and instantly be presented with an overview of the entire city and state. Just by clicking on a main page headline, I could access every pertinent story in its entirety. If you compare the old madison.com to the new,
Look at all the headlines!
the old features one story prominently, with a sampling of the text, and then offers a glimpse at TWENTY other headlines. If you were to page down beyond the screenshot, you’d be presented with an even vaster bevy of sports, feature and opinion headlines, effectively allowing you to access every tidbit of news that had crossed the wires within the past four to six hours. Not wasting space, they even found a small area to devote to that video product they’re oh-so-proud of.
But if you turn to the new madison.com,
wah-wah...
the amount of information you’re presented with point-blank is, frankly, underwhelming. Compared to 22 stories on the old madison.com, the new presents you with a measly nine-and-a-half. If you count the rotating “top stories” (I don’t, because in my years on the Internet, I’ve learned to tune out the moving parts of websites because they’re usually ads), that bumps the total up to a paltry dozen — that is, if you can catch the story you want as it rolls through. Even so, at a glance, it gives nowhere near the comprehensive picture the old madison.com presented.
It turns out, you can click the up and down arrows on the non-pixel-efficient “headline list” to move up or down to more headlines. Never mind that doing so risks another computer crash if you’ve managed to avoid one so far. It took me a day to figure out that there was more to the headline list than immediately met the eye. Websites shouldn’t necessitate a learning curve. Most web surfers aren’t duty-bound to scour the web for headlines the way I am. If nothing grabs their eye right out of the gate, they’ll just click right on by.
Madison.com’s parent company, Capital Newspapers, is pushing the changes as an “upgrade” to the navigability of their website. But the longest-standing hindrance to navigation on the website, the dysfunctional archive search feature, hasn’t been upgraded at all, as far as I can tell. It still misses as often as it hits.
But now that the website has migrated, a more efficient Google search for your topic of choice is impossible as well, at least for the time being. Madison.com did not leave its old pages active, meaning that until Google maps the new website as effectively as the old, you’re left with no way to find the pertinent information you’re seeking.
I guarantee you the people most upset about that are the staff at the Cap Times and the State Journal, who are without a quick means of cross-referencing projects they’re working on with archived articles, for the time being.
And while we’re on the subject of staffing, as slick as the new website looks, I wish the publishers had taken the money they paid to web designers, consultants and graphic designers and put it toward maintaining their newsroom personnel instead. While I might eventually learn to navigate the new site, and even like it (though I doubt it), my bellyaching about an apparent lack of content is nothing compared to the actual growing lack of content the papers suffer due to mounting staff cuts.
It may make me a curmudgeonly reactionary, but damnit, I liked the way it was, and if madison.com made a gateway available to those of us who’d prefer a list of headline links, I’d gladly use it.
14 Comments for this entry
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September 4th, 2009 on 1:16 am
“leaves anywhere between 15 and 30 percent of their former readership in the technological dust”
Your guess is pretty close: Wikipedia reports that 25% of people still use IE6. Now go download Firefox for that work computer…
September 4th, 2009 on 7:43 am
Ha ha, still got it.
September 4th, 2009 on 8:08 am
We agree that the “new” site for Madison Newspapers is “worse” than the old site. Take a look, while you’re at it, Dusty, at the “new” Channel 3000 site. Same thing. Blocky homepage appearance; harder to find NEWS. You and I could not agree more that CONTENT is what wins.
And both the newspaper and the TV station think “check out our new website!!!” is good promotion.
One of the ugliest websites on earth, that looks like it was designed by a 5th-grader using the first edition of Microsoft Front Page, is also one of the most successful on earth, and it essentially single-handedly killed the newspaper classified ad industry. (Craigslist.com) CONTENT.
I’ve learned vividly in the past 8 months that the people who have the FINAL say-so on website design…not the techies, not the designers, not the content providers….but the top echelon of the business structure…are often interested only in being “NEW” and “HOT”. (Because they heard at a seminar that the web is evolving and developing, and they need to stay up-to-the-minute.) Since these people who have the final say do not own iPods or Blackberries or smart phones, they have no concept of what they’re “managing”. Try to explain RSS to a person who hasn’t even mastered the “complexity” of e-mail.
The most senior (in terms of age) partner in the broadcasting company that employs you used to teach, in his sales seminars, about the station managers who wanted to wear the latest fashions, drive the newest car, own all the latest stuff…but when it came to programming their station or developing their sales staff, they were 20 years behind the times. He was a visionary. (His initials are PWF.)
But – one thing on which we disagree – that former boss of yours who wanted you to do internet news: he did more than read the phrase “web two-point-oh” somewhere. He now owns and runs one of the most successful news website startups in the US, and since starting it in January has so quickly monetized it that I am now a PAID writer for him. He’s been paying his writers monthly since MAY. Five months from zero to profits. Web 2.0.
And, you need only to look at your own station’s website to illustrate how little real support there is in your building for your internet presence. As of this morning, it still hawked, on the front page, hourly news from ABC. How long ago did you change to CBS?
At least the station website’s “local headlines” are updated once a day now – on weekdays, not weekends…usually….
Next time, we’ll talk about the huge variances in moment-to-moment audio levels that make listening to the station on the internet an “interesting” experience….
/tjm
September 4th, 2009 on 8:32 am
Nuts, now the article I’ve been working on is going to seem redundant and boring. Well encapsulated, Dusty.
Something else that is rarely considered is the differently-abled readers. Everyone thinks flash is so…flashy, but when they switch to it they are giving a big middle finger to the blind and near-blind, because their readers can’t translate flash.
September 4th, 2009 on 8:38 am
Oh, and I really hope they fix the urls because now dane101 is plagued by 100s of broken links that once went somewhere at madison.com. Now they are roads to nowhere. We had the same problem after their previous upgrade. Seriously going to screw up their google algorithms. I’m shocked they didn’t take that into consideration.
September 4th, 2009 on 11:46 am
I agree. That’s why the Drudge report which is one of the most god-awfully ugly websites in existence still gets so much traffic. There are tons of headlines available, and it loads fast, in any browser.
September 4th, 2009 on 3:51 pm
It’s not just older browsers they’re leaving out. Try the new site on an iPhone or other smart phone. It’s useless.
The site is way too reliant on javascript. Javascript should enhance function, not drive it.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/progressiveenhancementwithjavascript/
September 5th, 2009 on 8:48 am
As the designer of the site which you are reading, I must offer a “hear, hear!” http://dustinchristopher.com may not be fancy, but it is both W3C compliant and mobile enabled. Post some iPhone screenshots, Dusty.
September 5th, 2009 on 5:16 pm
I’ll add that there does not seem to be a “top stories” RSS and that links from a feed to my Google homepage are not functional.
September 7th, 2009 on 8:05 am
It’s also odd that their old feed now serves me what looks like reporters’ personal memos about their leave time and furlough days:
http://host.madison.com/article_6a1cdd0e-6c29-5620-b0cb-e1880eb8edf8.html
and emails?
http://host.madison.com/article_7a7694e2-d393-58a1-becb-d6a285ca1ff6.html
and their “contact us” link was busted for a long time. (I’m not even gonna bother checking if it still is.)
September 8th, 2009 on 7:14 am
The new Madison.com is far worse than the old one. It’s such a pain to use that I’ve stopped going there. Too bad. It was a good source of local news, but it’s not worth fighting with.
September 8th, 2009 on 3:27 pm
Good blog, Dusty. I think what gets missed a lot of the time is that the format is not the thing. Good reporting and editing can exist in any format. But as news rooms contract there’s just going to be less content and less quality and you can’t dress that up no matter what you do with format either in print or on the web.
September 8th, 2009 on 10:54 pm
Among the reasons left here, I also hate that it’s so monotone. It makes it very, very difficult to distinguish anything. I, too, have stopped going there.
September 9th, 2009 on 12:14 am
Mayor Cieslewicz, can’t you, I dunno, issue an executive order at the newspaper folks or something?
Seriously though, thank you all for the feedback… I’m glad I’m not the only one cheesed off with the madison.com folks right now. I think a petition would be going a little far, but I will be forwarding all the comments on this page en masse to the paper’s editors in another couple of days. Feel free to heap on.