New Herald site
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So Old Granny is putting on some hotpants and moving into the 21st century.
Their comments page is still stuck in the 19th century, but hey, with brightly coloured boxed highlighting pictures of cheerleaders in tight... whatever they are wearing... how could they go wrong?
So what do YOU think?
(P.S. Site works perfectly in Firefox on Linux. Big ups to the developers.)
44 Responses
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Looks nicer. Like the headlines going across the page as well rather than down.
I think.
Call me back in a week.
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I went in today for a chat and a look. The revamp is by Shift, but it's part of a general expansion, with new staff etc.
They're ticking a lot of the right boxes: the whole front end is CSS-based, with feeds up the wazoo - including feeds for specific topics, based on a pervasive system of tags.
The tags are interesting. The funny thing is that they're useful because the Herald site, whatever its failings may have been at various times, has always had really good metadata. They just didn't use it very well - did anyone ever use the "search by subject" option in the onsite search?
Now you get relevant subject categories listed at the top of your search results. eg: a search for "Labour" yields the Department of Labour, Labour Day and Labour Party categories.
I think they've done a good job of appearing to open up more white space, while getting more on the page: Sideswipe on the home page for example (people trying to find Sideswipe were accounting for about half the search activity from the home page). It's also better set up for display advertising. Wish we had some o' them iPod ads. (There still seems to be a bug in the code one of the companies serving ads that makes the ads load very slowly in Safari. Bah.)
So they're doing some pretty cool stuff. Still no blog or forum functionality, but I'd expect Nigel Horrocks to get some of that going.
Downside: Premium content is still there. Now it's marked with little gold stars. Usual workarounds apply, afaik.
BTW, the Herald folks admired the quality of our discussions here ...
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BTW, the Herald folks admired the quality of our discussions here ...
Well thanks to "here" I've stopped ruddy blogging!!!
It is nice though being able to have non agressive discussions with people you don't know.
The Herald site reminds me a little bit of the sydney morning herald site (which is telling me England have bowled Aussie out for 244).
I like the layout and volume of articles in the sport section. Clicking on league after following the sport link leads me quite nicely to more than enough reading...
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Hmm, I was just wondering when Stuff.co.nz would play catch-up, and lo & behold if you go to their site now, there is a splash page with a new logo and a message apologising for they delay while the newly designed site comes online!
Herald site looks good - at first it seemed quite busy visually, but I can see how it will all work well. Very fresh & clean. I know many in Auckland moan about the Herald, but I think it is a lot better than the rag we have down here...
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I was going over the two new designs wednesday and the Stuuff redesign wasn't meant to be rolled out for a while yet.
What is the value of a splash page and your business isn't operating just because your competition has rolled their site.
The herald looks great and Russell your right the css and metatags are great.
This site Newsdesigner mainly looks at actual newspaper redesigns (whou would have thought there were enough going on to sustain a web site...).
http://www.newsdesigner.com/blog/They have some really interesting stuff.
Most stuff by Mario Garcia is pretty well done. A few actual rags could do with a shake up to mirror their cyberselfs.
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Heh, just been working right through the night and popped over here for some R&R only to see Compie's comment above...grrrr
What can I say, apologies for the inconvenience. We had hoped to launch last weekend but illness in the ranks set us back a few days.
The Herald site looks great, good to see Kristine acknowledged and I only hope the Shift team are as knackered as we are.
Compie, this one's for you mate:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/270151a20097.html
:-)
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illness in the ranks
Yikes, sorry about that. Best laid plans etc...
Last week of my thesis lets hope I don't need to put a splash page up ;-)
I'll give you guys top marks for better treatment for the advertising on Stuff. The banner adds on the herald are a dog, but what can you do. Design a nice site and the adds are ugly (not to mention too big).
Nice gallery BTW. very clean. He's a footballing god despite the brain failure (mind you he did nut an Italian footballer, that should happen for them just walking on the pitch).
Both sites get 10/10 for modernisation. You guys get 9/10 for giving each newspaper more of an identity than before (been a long time Stuff reader).
Also Stuff loads faster. I know Dunedin is almost the bottom of the world, and varsity connection has slowed to a craw (pay the bill Otago) recently, but the Heralds site is a dog to load, a dead dog. I've given up on it a couple of times in the last 24hrs.
Is that enough sucking up?
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BTW.
what you did to the TAB site is fantastic.
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Stuff's new site is up, and I'm surprised at how similar the new Herald and Stuff sites look. They're not clones, but they both have a cool, spacious blue and white design. In fact, it even looks like the same shade of blue used in headlines and links on both sites.
I'm not complaining - they're both a vast improvement on the old sites (and a sweet farewell to the '90s) and indeed news websites are primarily about news, but it's going to take me a while to mentally differentiate between the two.
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Wow. Progress. Who's have thought, eh? 8-)
Hey wow, TV3 actually has a website these days, too.
Now, will somebody please do something about TVNZ's site?
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nige,
Sorry to miss you RB when you came into the Herald . I was upstairs busy loading stuff. There are plans but obviously not for discussion here! Any thoughts on interactivity you'd like to see on the new Herald site are most welcome. Email me websurfer@gmail.com
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I wouldn't describe the NZ Herald as 'Granny in hot pants' but more like an embarrasing un pc uncle. The site may look more la-de-da but it still reads like a tabloid posing as a broadsheet.
The subtle institutionalised xenaphobic journalism is still present (for proof have a read of Simon Rattue's highly misguided piece on the Welsh). Whether it was toungue in cheek or not isn't the point it was massivly offensive.
Alot of dirge printed in the Herlad make the some of British redtop tabloids look like quality papers. That takes some effort.
The new site is slow, unresponsive and dull.
Oh well I suppose you can't polish a turd. -
forget the content, i'd just like to be able to see the thing.
Seriously is it me, or is the herald a dog to load.
I'm on a fast mac on a fast varsity connection using safari. What's the guts, it just hangs.
Argh, back to stuff.co.nz
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I'm on a fast mac on a fast varsity connection using safari. What's the guts, it just hangs.
I'm informed that it's code from one of the companies serving ads to the site that conflicts with Safari. I get much better results with Firefox.
My impression is that the performance problems on the site are basically down to the ads. Bah.
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Barks like a dog on IE6 at my work (won't load properly, text is too big, no images, half the links look like rubbish), but it seems ok on IE7 at home.
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code from one of the companies serving ads to the site
If I had 5c for everytime this has happened in the last year...
When will they learn?
Don't laugh people, but at the moment (competing thesis), I'm spending at least 4 hrs a day online if not more, and I'm getting a little sick of adds supplied from other servers holding things up.
Plus also I just like sticking to the one browser (you don't switch between Word and Pages because one doesn't work properly).
the time it's taken for me to write this post, the Herald is still stuck between pages.
At least PA System doesn't have this problem. Cheers for the heads up Russell.
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Nige,
if the Herald is looking for interactivity, look no further than the simple audio visual featurette on this page about the passing of the Atlantic music mogul Ahmet Ertegun.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/16/arts/music/16erte.html?_r=1&oref=sloginWithout going into full on flash or video, it's simple and effective. Great use of sound and vision.
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"Loading: 'New Zealand Herald'"........................................................
I give up.
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Just as well. You'd be confronted with Coddington's effort on global warming. She waxes lyrical about a book she hasn't even read.
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after 22mins I gave up trying to see what that most esteemed journo is up to now.
Sure the firefox solution works, but when you're confronted with the ugliest banner add in the history of the world. Haven't they got any dignity. FXCM needs shooting.
Why the hell would you dillute your look.
This round goes to Stuff.
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There seems to be a range of JavaScript errors that may be causing the problems for us Safari users. Safari logs unsafe JavaScript which relates to interaction between the Herald site and the Doublclick (ads) site.
Firefox lists several warnings and errors. I suspect that Firefox is a bit more "brutal" in skipping past faulty code. <shrug>
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Nope, I still haven't managed to see what the new Herald looks like, just times out (eventually). They might as well ditch the advertising, its not making them money if noone can see if, and if they can't see the site at all, that's even worse.
The Stuff one is definitely an improvement though. -
The Herald is virtually unusable for me in Safari. Occasionally I'll strike it lucky and the page will load, or I'll be able to stop the page loading and it'll display the article text, but most of the time I'm left with the top navigation bar, the masthead, and a whole lot of blank.
But also, for the last three weekdays, I've found a free copy of the Herald on my doorstep. It appears to be some sort of summer promotion, but how curious that the free paper coincides with the unusable website.
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most grannies I know are quite quick on the uptake having been there and seen that etc. The new herald site reminds me of the simpsons episode with the 'biteback dog'
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