Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 25 May 2007 at 16:14
Tags: Press Gazette, design
Apologies for the long silence on this blog — the relaunch of the Press Gazette web site has been preoccupying me for weeks. But after a few technical glitches a few days ago, the main site is finally live and things are finally settling down enough to take stock.
The site was designed by Jody Willis at Abacus E-Media, using the new branding developed for Press Gazette by Michael Crozier.
Like several recent newspaper relaunches, we have decided to switch to a 1,024-pixel page width with horizontal navigation elements. This opens up a lot of space for use of large photographs and the multimedia content we are increasingly using.
As anticipated, the decision to remove the left-hand navigation bar has not been universally popular. One reader has already written to me requesting the return of the old navigation elements.
“Users should not have to scroll down to navigate,” he wrote. Quite right — but you don’t actually have to scroll to navigate the site. All of the medium-specific sections are accessible directly from the main horizontal menu by hovering over the “Home” menu item.
Other readers have written in wondering about the new location of their favourite sections. With the exception of the News Diary section, everything is still there, but may be under slightly different headings. We’re working on fixing a problem with the feed from Foresight News, which supplies the content for the diary section, and should be restoring that feature soon.
In the age of converging media, Press Gazette’s old sections — newspapers, magazines, broadcasting, and new media — made less and less sense. Why should a story about a regional newspaper’s online video efforts be in one section, while something about the BBC’s similar efforts are in another? We have abandoned these medium-specific categories in the print edition, but they are still available online where they are less of a problem because it is possible to put the same story in multiple sections of the web site.
However, we have augmented these existing sections with a new “Special Reports” section that groups stories in topical categories that cut across all all media. It includes new sections on areas that we have always covered but that never fit neatly into our previous site’s more limited taxonomy, such as Media Law and Journalism Education.
Because journalism is such a diverse field, we would have liked to move beyond such traditional horizontal and vertical taxonomy with the flexibility of blog-style tagging system, but that wasn’t an option for the first phase of the relaunch.
Another problem we’re still working on resolving relates to our RSS feeds. Some users, who initially subscribed to Press Gazette feeds more than about six months ago, may not have had their feed redirected its new location and may be puzzled why they are not seeing any new stories in their newsreader. This problem should be resolved soon, but if you’re affected by this bug, the quick fix is to manually change your subscription to the new RSS feed.
All of the major sections are still available as seperate Press Gazette RSS feeds, but we’ll be adding more feeds for our new special reports in the coming weeks.
Questions? Comments? Concerns? Any feedback about the redesigned site is very welcome so feel free to leave a comment below.
