Time to gauge the public: Feedback wanted on my paper's "new" Web site

Here's our old site:


Pretty simple, clear cut, everything is easy to find.

Now, here's our "new" and supposedly "improved" site:


Which one is better? Which one do you think our readers will go ape-shit about tomorrow morning?

The "new" site has a scroll bar within the browser window in every fucking box.

This is somehow supposed to make us attractive to buyers when we get sold within the next few months or whenever. I definitely do not see this making us more attractive to anyone.

Also, most news paper sites have a printable view and an e-mail story link. We have neither.

This whole process, from us switching to an Internet-based CMS to this site, has been a royal pain in the ass.

 

Yeah, that looks like crap.

Leave it to the idiots in charge to forget the "improved" in "new and improved."

 

Looks a lot like my paper's site, which is roundly disparaged in the newsroom. Can't find ANYTHING on our site. We promo our BLOGS!...which have no links on the front page.

 

I don't go on our paper's Web site in the office either.

 

You can barely read "newsenterprise" in the new one because the blue font blends in with the background.

 

The readers will go ape-shit no matter what, though. You could replace the shittiest site ever with the best site ever, and the readers will be up in arms for at least a week. They don't like change.

That said, sometimes I think newspaper Web people think they need to reinvent the wheel to justify their existence, and the management happily leaps on-board because "the Web is the future!!!!"

 

Yep. Plus at least the old one has articles on it.

 

I like the old one better, it's cleaner.

 

our new web site isn't much better. When they upgraded us over the winter, they buried sports the point where there are a few links down near the bottom...no photo like the old site

apparently it's a company-wide thing...it looks better than the old one, but not nearly as functional.

 

I know you have Kentucky connections, Bob. Are you LCNI?

Most every LCNI paper - us (Elizabethtown), Bardstown, Oldham County are the three I'm closest to - has been told to switch to this format, which is backwards.

We're supposed to write the story on the internet - instead of Word - which is a really bad idea because if you lose a story, there's no where for it to go (as happened to our crime reporter who lost a 40-inch story despite routinely saving every 2-3 paragraphs) and THEN copy the story into Quark (and lose every single style sheet, which is a pain in the ass when doing boxscores/agate).

Thing is, once we get sold, supposedly we'll go back to our old server and town news (which I really don't mind).

Superb.

 

We just had a web redsign. Every story printed takes up about 10 pages of paper because it prints every element on the page with each story. When we brought that to our internet guy's attention he responded: "Do we want readers to print the stories?"
What a fucknut.

 

why do you hate old people, buck?