The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)
After 20 years, they still are adapting to the &#x27;new&#x27; platform. Look through their site with fresh eyes: If you were designing a news website (rather than moving a newspaper to this new platform), how many design, UI and functionality choices would you make differently?<p>A quick start:<p>* The separation of different forms of content: They don&#x27;t really mix text with video, images and graphics, even though most web-native bloggers will do it. They seem to lack fluency with mixing media; it&#x27;s a project for them. They&#x27;ll staple a video and decorate text with images and graphics, but they don&#x27;t really commuicate with it; they don&#x27;t say, &#x27;here&#x27;s how Clinton responded to Sanders:&quot; &lt;video&gt;, or, &#x27;here was the scene when the earthquake struck&#x27; &lt;video&gt;, or even in a movie review, here&#x27;s what the scene looks like: &lt;video&gt; or &lt;image&gt;. Instead, they try to describe the visual with text. Even explanatory graphics are a separate, special production, on a separate page.<p>* The font in their title: Back when printing fancy fonts was a technological feat, this font communicated that they were serious and sophisticated. Now, if you step back and ignore the history, it looks like a kid playing with fonts. (Look at it this way: would you <i>ever</i> use that font on a website you were designing?). It says, insists even: We&#x27;re anchored to the paper age and will never let go. We&#x27;re the old, dying generation. If you want something new, go elsewhere.<p>* The discoverability of content: Obviously mimicing a newspaper, but a bad choice for the web. How many links are on that home page (scroll down)? And even more content doesn&#x27;t even appear there. All that hard work and content, unlikely ever to be found, buried and lost forever. It&#x27;s tragic.  But that&#x27;s what they did in the hard copy newspaper so I guess it&#x27;s ok.<p>* Also, where are stories updated since I visited a couple hours ago? Oh look, if I look at every link a red &#x27;updated&#x27; indicator is next to some links (just like the web 20 years ago!), which I see if I examine every one of them (and how do I identify brand new links in this massive page of links?) - but where in this multi-page story are the new parts? I guess I&#x27;ll just re-read the whole thing.<p>I say this all out of love. They are an very important institution. The news business is hard enough; stop handicapping yourselves! From the outside they look like they still, in 2015, haven&#x27;t fully embraced the new technology. What would you say about another business&#x27; web team (that was not adapting a newspaper to the web) that produced a site that looked like this? Egads. [1]<p>EDIT: Some minor edits and additions<p>[1] I&#x27;m not blaming the web developers; I assume they are working within the general constraint of: Make it look like the newspaper.