The New York Times Reboot

Screen grab from the redesigned New York Times website.

The website for the New York Times has been updated in a pretty clear attempt to capitalize on some current trends in web design. It's been what, two or three years now, at least, since a major change in their site layout, so this redesign is a welcome endeavour. According to their editor, this new attempt aims at

"a refreshed look, streamlined navigation, expanded use of video and other multimedia and better ways to see what other readers are looking at, searching for and talking about."

In general, it seems like the new site will live up to those goals, but otherwise doesn't push too many boundaries.

Here's the big thing though: They switched fonts. Yup, the New York Times is no longer using Times New Roman, that old stalwart, and has instead switched to the blog-trendy Georgia. It's slightly lighter, and fits with their overall site goals, it seems. But man... Anyway.

My initial reactions:

It's a little disorientating. Maybe because I'm so used to their old page, but this new layout will take some getting used to. It's obvious they tried to keep a certain amount of similarity so as to be not be too jarring, but still, it affects the way I scan the page.

They're buying into the push for more "white space" in their design, with subtler borders and menu headings, especially. This generally helps the flow of the page, but with this much content, can lead to a cluttered feel.

The central image on the main page is almost too distinctive, especially due to the increased white space and subtler highlights in the rest of the page. My eye is certainly drawn to the picture, but almost refuses to leave it. It tends to pull attention away from the headline to the left, which is squished in between the image and the menu.

New Features:

One intriguing little nugget is the "My Times" link at the top of the page. While currently under development, it promises to "let you create a personalized page with what you like best in The New York Times and your favorite sites and blogs from all over the Web." That could be a pretty interesting little tool, potentially overlapping with some of the features and roll of Newsvine.

Additionally, there's an emphasis on serving more video and multi-media content. As is generally the case, this is one of the best features of the internet, specifically contrasted to traditional papers, so it's good to see them make use of it. Their player appears to be Windows Media based, though possibly because of my computer settings. Divisions within the video page are divided into channels that correspond to the various sections of the paper.

A more expanded Most Popular page is a plus, listing not only Most Emailed (as before), but also Most Blogged, Searched, and a list of popular movies. I often had used the Most Emailed section of the old site to come up with an interesting article or two that I might otherwise had missed (ie, outside the sections I normally read), so I'm glad their beefing this page up.

Rounding out the major new additions is the Times Topics page. This tool is meant to be a reference tool in the vein of the printed Times Index, an easy place to look up related articles and features on a specific topic. They include sections on people, organizations, subjects, and places, as well as a Top Topics This Week list, that will undoubtedly reflect current news stories. Should be interesting to see how much use this tool gets, though I could see it proving useful for research and background on other stories, as well as catching up on the history of topics that come back into prevalence.

To sum up:

Many of the internal pages of the site still contain elements from the old design (here, for instance), but these will most likely get phased out over time as they continue to update things. When you come upon one though, it draws the contrast between the two designs out. The new site layout is definitely more up-to-date feeling (and more in line with the Web 2.0 movement). It's not that the site is ugly, but it isn't really remarkable either. From such a prominent website, I expected a little more. Perhaps as I dive into the new design more, however, I'll be pleasantly surprised. We'll see.

Update: Check out the archive.org Wayback Machine to take a look at past nytimes.com designs, and compare. http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://nytimes.com

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