Interestingly, both the leading newspaper sites decided to launch their redesigned site at the same day/week (mere coincidence..or?).
Well, the common theme across the two redesigns is that Indian media sites are embracing international look and moving away from traditional content heavy design to a lot more structured design.
Here is our first hand review of the two redesigned sites
- Homepage is still cluttered, but surely better than earlier – content is better organized.
- News page (i.e. article page)’s font needs a rethink – bigger isn’t beautiful.
- Placement of ads on news page can be played with.
- Less ads on the homepage is a good change – though I am not sure for how long can they continue this way.
- In general, bad use of font typography – colors aren’t coherent and a lot can be improved.
TimesofIndia Redesigned Website - Magazine styled
HindustanTimes Redesigned Website - Magazine styled
- Nicely done homepage – looks sleek and has an international appeal.
- Beautiful (that’s the right word) use of font typography and colors.
- News ticker sucks – takes away the attention from main content.
- Excessive obsession with ‘moving objects’ – right from ads to tickers to their own properties, wants to show every possible content on the site.
- Ads on news page (i.e. article page) needs a rethink – in general, modules are placed randomly and doesn’t give a coherent look to the site.
- Buggy – doesn’t work well with Chrome and there are some ‘not found’ errors on the homepage.
- Surfacing related content is not at all intuitive
What’s your take on the redesigns?
Much needed change! When one is exposed to international news sites like NYT, one doesn’t feel like reading news on these sites. It was about time they changed.But I feel there is still some scope for improvement.
@shashi for improvement in HT you can visit http://talktoht.com that they have deployed for ideas around HT… very soon you will have their consolidated effort through crowd-sourcing. cheers, Marvin
HT has redesigned the print newspaper as well. And both the site and the paper designs look in sync. Overall, a good job
Business Standard is far better
Time for some pluggd.in redesign to enhance user experience, increase reader time on site and thereby increase ad revenue with better placements and not the other way round??
Redesign is on the cards.
Clarity on ‘not the other way round’?
HT site was redesigned and launched almost a month back. Yesterday they also launched their redesigned print newspaper. TOI of course launched its redesigned site yesterday.
Sites need to be designed with the consumer first and SEO BOTs / Ads next … unfortunately putting too much for better indexing or more banners has dominated the designs for most large Indian portals.
Hopefully this will set a new trend to make sites usable and readable … particularly the content heavy ones in India. On the web … Less is More!!