[Sigia-l] CNN.com redesign

[Laurie Gray]

Kudos to anyone who worked on the cnn.com redesign. I'm digging it. I
*thought* something was different when I launched it from my Google homepage
- and what struck me immediately was that it didn't look as busy. At first,
I thought one of the biggest changes was less advertising (I can dream,
can't I?) but that wasn't it. Compliments of the internet wayback archive, I
was able to compare two home pages side by side, and the changes became
clearer. They've achieved a lot through the judicious use of white space and
color. They've also gotten rid of a lot of "junk" - compare the "other news"
section now with the old homepage. In my experience, the suggestion to
remove those little links that used to appear under the other news headlines
(Under U.S., it used to say "section page", "video", and "local news") would
have caused some web producer or product manager or marketing person to go
into absolute hysterics, but look at the difference in the page without
them. It's SO much better.

If you have any inside knowledge of this project, I'd love to know how the
idea to cut all that stuff out was sold to the people in charge...

Laurie