Strib Redesign

As a St. Pauler, I’ve long tried to keep allegiance to the Pioneer Press. Alas, I’ve found it to be increasingly vapid and falling far behind the Strib in terms of good local reporting. I still support it, as it’s a rare thing in this day in age to have a city with two major papers.

But, I’m now a Strib reader more often than not. The Strib just redesigned as well, and has created an online redesign guide for Strib readers.

Granted, the redesign guide is a crappy flash site with the hallmark “let’s confine the actual content of the page into a cheesy, small, scrolling box”. That said, the content is nice. The redesign looks promising. I’m especially excited about the expanded world news section. Another nicety is the claim that they’ll offer more stores that *don’t* continue on another page. About time. The entire aesthetic of the redesign also has a very modern vibe to it. The Pioneer Press has some catching up to do…

As for the new website, for starters, congrats on doing a simultaneous redesign. The new site is clearly better in terms of organizing the navigation. The old site, like a lot of long-lived content-rich sites was suffering from years of patchwork upgrades which created a navigation system that never failed to confuse me. The site is laid out with CSS-P–a very nice improvement.

The fly-out navigation isn’t the best, but they did make it accessible by allowing for non-javascript users to still navigate the site.

The home page is much more inviting. In addition to the simplified navigation, there’s not nearly the amount of ads as there were before.

There’s still bugs…many of the articles linked to non-existent pages and it seems that some links randomly launch in pop-up windows, but, overall, a very nice move forward.