The Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s website got a major makeover today. Both its look and organization have changed.
The front page includes this editor’s note:
To our readers:
Welcome to the new staradvertiser.com — redesigned throughout to offer an easy-to-read experience with larger photos, videos and graphics.
On the one hand, I’m glad the S-A photographers are getting better play. On the other hand, I’m not sure how I feel about the presentation of the news. The new style seems to deemphasize “hard” news, or maybe fails to convey the idea that the reader looking for hard news should take some time to find it here.
But I’ve only looked at it for a few minutes.
What’s your reaction?
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I guess one of my favorite sites is http://www.bbc.com/news for layout that emphasizes news value and de-emphasizes the photos. But I realize that we’re moving into an age when pictures mean more than words, readers (and viewers) can’t be bothered with too much information. They want stuff that moves, shoots, amazes.
Too much to wade through. They are trying to impose a television news format to a webpage. Better to have it all there up front and then allow the reader to pick where they want to go.
Just tried the search box – doesn’t work. Tried it in two different browsers.
I view the S-A on a desktop screen and find the redesign modern, bright and uncluttered. I think it is more thought-out than what it replaced. I quite like it. The only three things I would tweak are:
1. Yes, the pulsating photos are distracting but if I take Dramamine, the queasiness goes away.
2. The headlines/links would be better in full black than gray (as someone has mentioned)
3. It now takes two clicks from the main page to get to a useful page of Hawaii news: First on “More Hawaii News” and then again on the same “More Hawaii News.” Once should be enough.
Don’t know if it’s related but me and wife can’t get the updated iOS app to work. So we haven’t even seen it yet!
Interesting. I don’t get any “zoom” photos with my Safari browser. I do get those “grey” news blurbs that are hard to read in part because they are contrasted against the huge photos.
1. I hate it.
2. I liked the StarAdvertiser Mobile site. Worked fine on any web browser, was free of clutter and text was easy to read (large) and click on. They should bring it back.
3. Large pictures and video penalize users who have bandwidth caps on mobile devices.
You make a good point that the large photos and video are likely to be bandwidth hogs.
I’ve noticed in chrome on win 8 the page has a lag time to scroll. If that isn’t fixed it’s pretty much useless as you can’t reasonably navigate the site. Bumbye
Also (in my case anyway) it seems not to retain the login – have had to log in 3 times this morning already.
I thought I would try one more time to look, considering the amount of money I pay each month for a subscription. But no, they have forgotten who I am, and my “remembered” login and password do not match. So no access to stories, what few there are that I am interested in. Photos are way too big for the tiny, hard to read story listing to the right.
If I think of it again today, I plan to call and cancel my subscription until they get it settled. But honestly, there are so many other places on the net where I can read local news now. SA should have made it EASIER not harder for subscribers.
I don’t like it either, and it appears not to include all of the stories that are in print. I’ll be taking a break from the online version for a few days.
Auwe. Hate it, problems signing in, old site automatic. This lolo format is is more work that i want to do in the mornings. Go back to old format. I shall not be renewing ! memo
They seem to be messing with it “live”. The breathing pictures are still there, but the type on the rogjt side is now larger but still not black. It turns black when you mouse over it, which is unnecessary and frivolous.
I did just get a whole slew of error mesages–11 of them–that look like this:
Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$gender in /nas/content/live/staradvertiser/resources/clickability.resources.php on line 487
or this
Notice: Undefined index: subrate_id in /nas/content/live/staradvertiser/resources/gateway.resources.php on line 137
As to forgetting the logon, likely the cookie is different, so (if it works as it should) subsequent logons will be remembered. A question for me is whether it will time out after a while. On the old website I would get locked out if I tried to access via my phone if it still thought I was connected via a browser on the PC. Civil Beat works properly, the SA never did.
The large images on a desktop browser may not be delivered to a phone. I see from the page coding that it tries to learn from where it is being accessed.
I agree that the SA is overemphasizing graphics. I think readers expect news, and instead they get large and mostly unnecessary graphics or images and strange headlines. It’s a “style” I suppose, but not one that serves the readers well.
The emphasis on giant graphics seems to be(coming) an industry standard. The NYT & WP have both have this format for major stories. It works well enough on desktops but not so much on mobile devices.
Re: mobile devices. How is the SA’s app for iOS? Tried it a while ago & it was terribly buggy. Has it improved?
It’s the ongoing tyranny of the smart-phone format which is causing ‘news’ sites to move to this arrangement. (I like my smart-phone; it’s useful. But that in itself isn’t anywhere near enough reason to justify the conversion of news sites from ‘usable’ to ‘largely useless.’)
That being said, though, it seems to me that enough news sources have made this conversation that the S-A should be able to figure out how to do it correctly, even if I seriously wish they wouldn’t. On a pc, their print is tiny-tiny; the photos big-big. The log-ins don’t hold AT ALL. There is less information, which is apparently being ‘balanced out’ by more videos of things happening on the mainland.
So. The specifics of this particular conversion don’t work well. And in general, I find it really depressing that the “more-graphics-fewer words” approach to telling the news is not going to break in our favor as a society.
I just do not see Hawaii Millennials flocking to the Star-Advertiser, no matter what they do with graphics. Appeasing a fickle audience is agonizing.