pareidolia

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.

I suddenly have much more free time

So, as of fri­day, I’m unem­ployed.

Expect there to be increased activ­ity over here on the blog. I’ve already imple­mented com­ments (some­thing I’ve been mean­ing to do for a while any­way) and I’ve got a new design in the works.

Also, and I think this goes with­out say­ing, if you have any money you want to throw at me for doing some “work,” please, send me some elec­tronic mail.

blogs

I really dis­like see­ing this on a blog:

“Check out the rest of our [what­ever] after the jump.”

This is annoy­ing for at least 5 reasons:

1. This is intended to let peo­ple know that there is more con­tent in the “full” blog post as opposed to the “sum­mary.” The only prob­lem is that I often only read the full blog posts, because I am directed to the blog — not from the front­page — but from another web­site that links to the full post. To me, this is just annoy­ing and makes me want to stop read­ing your worth­less blog.

2. “the jump” — who decided to call it this? It sounds fuck­ing idiotic.

3. This can be done in a much more effec­tive way, and I know it, I’ve seen it in blog soft­ware. You could have a sim­ple “read the full entry” or “read more” or even, god for­bid, “read more after the jump” pro­grammed as the text to the link to the full entry, which would GO AWAY when you get there. The only dif­fer­ence is that you don’t get to cus­tomize it per page. No more “check out more of my stu­pid use­less links to free soft­ware you already know about after the jump” or “see more pic­tures of my stu­pid cat after the jump.” Big fuck­ing loss.

4. One of the advan­tages of a blog/​cms is that your con­tent isn’t nec­es­sar­ily tied to the html — poten­tially, your writ­ing could be for­mat­ted for a new blog­ging sys­tem, or a book, or what­ever the inter­net will become in 30 years. The point is, you’d have to go back in and take that out, because you’re a fuck­ing moron. Look toward the future.

5. I’ve never under­stood why you would want to do this in the first place. What’s so wrong with just hav­ing the full post on the main page? Maybe your stu­pid con­tent aggregator/​evil alien over­lord of a boss forces you to com­ply with some arcane ad place­ment algo­rithm. I don’t care, the point is -

Don’t do it. It’s dumb, and it makes you look dumb.