Chicagoist Redesign Critique
I tried to post some of these comments on the forums, but their installation of Moveable Type seems to be running like frozen butter since the upgrade. So I’ll write it here instead.
Chicagoist implemented a new design recently. Chicagoist is part of a network of sites centered around cities, Londonist, SFist, etc. Commentary about what’s going on in the city. The redesign affects every site in the network, so these comments should apply to any of the other –ist sites as well.
Let me start off by saying that I like it overall. But I still have some problems.
1. It’s too narrow. The old design, and I’m basing this on my memories, seemed wider. It’s a fixed width design — I measured the width of the content of the site and it’s approximately 850 pixels wide. I have no idea if there is any objective reason to make a website 850 pixels.
Generally speaking, I design websites to be 960 pixels wide. This width is based on the viewable area of a browser when the window is maximized on a 1024 x 768 monitor. There is research to support that this is the resolution most people have their computer set to. Here’s a good one. I’m sure there is more out there.
So, unless there’s something I don’t know, there’s no real reason the site should be this narrow. Perhaps there’s some purpose that the original designer had, but without knowing it, I assume he/she is just stupid.
The new site has a border around the entire thing. This contributes to the boxed-in effect. The old design, however wide it was, had no definite edges. It’s possible that the border is part of what’s making it seem so narrow.
2. Moveable Type. It’s a dying program. No one should use it anymore. And furthermore, this implementation is really really slow. Perhaps they need a new server. But if it’s Moveable Type’s fault, it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m pretty sure that Kottke also uses MT, and his site isn’t unbearably slow.
3. Miscellaneous things. It’s possible these are bugs, so they may be fixed soon. But they still need to be mentioned.
a. Near the bottom of the page, the “Next” and “Previous” navigation elements — when I hover my mouse over these buttons, as well as the “1 2 3..” buttons, it becomes an opaque brown box. This doesn’t seem like it was intended, and if it is, there’s no reason that I shouldn’t see what I might want to click on.
b. Search Results — The space between each of the matching articles seemed really narrow. Too narrow to be intentional.
c. Miscellaneous other problems — On this page, the page title is really really big. So big that it pushes all the tags out of the box and they’re cut off. It’s possible this is just a Safari thing. I’m not going to bother checking it in other browsers, because that’s the job of the web designer. Also, at the bottom of every page, the “stats” link seems too close to the footer text. Also, who puts public links to stats anymore? That’s so 1997.
That’s about it. I was reading through the comments on their redesign announcement page, and so many people complaining about the changes as a whole. Whenever a redesign occurs, in any medium, people tend to complain quite loudly. Logos, newspapers, magazines, websites. People are comically afraid of change. I’ve seen it before, time and time again, so I feel it’s pretty safe to disregard what these people are saying.
My criticisms are all things that I think are errors in design. I don’t really care about things like the headlines being in a non-bold font. That seems like it was intentional. The things that I mentioned could be fixed easily. My criticisms are constructive. This redesign isn’t really changing much. The logo is the same. The color is the same. They still use Arial for their main body font. These people need to shut up.