The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette website launched a redesign today. It’s really more of a clean-up than a redesign because most of the elements are in the same place just presented in a cleaner way.

I wish I could show you a screen shot of it and give a more in-depth critique, but they are still working the kinks out of it and apparently they are having some issues serving the new design.

I’ve beat my head against templates and crashed servers using Ellington (their CMS open sourced as django) before.  The one thing I would recommend to them is more cache tags– they’re your friend to decrease server load (except in comments).

You’ve probably heard of mission creep and home page creep when you slowly ad links and bloat your home page overtime, but it’s also important to remember to be goal focused when you’re redesigning your home page. In a large organization I think  your home page design is often like an operator just helping someone quickly move along to the actual content they are looking for, but there is always an opportunity to provide to emphasis your primary goal– your conversions on your home page, too. There’s a great post on clickz about optimizing your home page and here’s some of their maxims of home page design.

• “If you emphasize everything, then nothing will be important.”
• “The purpose of the home page is to get people off of the home page.”
• “Unless a visual element directly supports a key conversion action, it should be removed.”

Chuck, the SEO rapper, released his Social Media Rap in February, but somehow I missed it. If you haven’t seent it you need to check it out.

Personally, I like his  Design & Coding rap better, but I like them all.

Here’s a great article from Smashing Magazine on 10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Web Design.  I’ve worked online in some form or fashion for about 10 years and this article really gets to the heart of a lot that I’ve experienced.  My favorite truths are

• You need a separate web division
• Periodic redesign is not enough
• Your website cannot appeal to everyone
• Design by committee brings death

I think I like these so much because I can related to them– I have lived them.

It’s so funny to me that I deal with the exact same issues at different organizations whenever I am new– this week it’s new windows! Opening up a new window is so important to people (who don’t understand the web) because they don’t want their users to leave their site– that’s just exhibiting a selfish desire to keep the user on their site.  Instead, let’s be generous to the user and respect their browsing experience.  If you respect the user, in the end your user, your customer will respect you and use your esrvices. I sent this out to my staff today and I thought this is perfect blog fodder, too! So here’s my philosophy (and some links to some folks who are an expert on web accessibility) on new windows:

Avoid opening new windows when at all possible—even when linking to pages off site. The web was made for links and when you send a user off to a valuable web site through a link they appreciate you keeping their browsing experience intact and will remember that you referred them to useful site and will come back to you (of course this assumes that we only link to valuable sites).

On the other hand opening a link in a new window opens a new browser on the user’s computer without their consent and breaks the back button where they cannot use normal usability constraints to find their way back to your site.  If you have ever watched a novice web user use a site where links are opening in new windows, then you know you are completely confusing them with those new windows and at the end of their browsing session they could have seven or eight windows open.

At times it is appropriate to pop-open a new window for special features such as flash animation, video or podcast. When we do pop-open the window it’s nice to make sure we are controlling the size of it to make sure the user can still the the original content behind it and know they are in a new window and if you want to be really nice you can provide a nice close button so the user can get rid of that window.

Here’s some good reads on not forcing a new window on the user

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• Don’t force windows on new users
• Dive into accessibility – Not opening new windows
• Discussion on opening new browser windows
• Accessibility tips

If you’re not sure whether or not you should open or new window, then err on the side of the user and just don’t open it.

If you’re tired of asking your family and friends to let you know what they think about your latest design and you don’t have time or money for formal usability testing, you should try out Feedback Army. The new service uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to get 10 random peoples response to any 10 questions you want to ask all for only $7. You normally get the first response to your question within a couple of minutes.

Joshua Benton at the Nieman Journalism Lab tried it out and said a couple of the responses were duds, but overall it was useful feedback.

MSNBC is showing off screen grabs of their new redesign. It looks like they are dropping their vertical navigation down the page below their top stories module. Also, they are flipping their top story module and listing of top story and within their top story module they are flipping their dominant top photo and headline. The page in general maintains the same look and feel as their pages right now.

Since the beginning of the web, web designers have continually worried about the fold and fought the fold. The fold is the mythical line that denotes what the user sees when they first visit a web site and what the user does not see (below the fold). (I believe the fold concept comes from newspaper design where designers had to make sure compelling photos and headlines were placed above the fold to drive single copy sales of newspapers placed in newspaper racks.) Content owners and advertisers constantly argue and harass web designers for placement above the fold to ensure that their content is seen.

Clicktale blog has exploded the myth of the fold with some of their recent research. Their research shows that basically the same percentage of page views will reach the middle of a web page regardless of the actual page height in pixels and Almost identical percentages of page views (15%-20%) reach the page bottom regardless of page height.

While you’re pondering the effect the fold disappearing has on your website you might want to investigate ClickTale’s Heatmaps.

NYTimes.com general manager, Vivian Schiller, reports that their slide show section has taken off accounting for 10 percent of their overall August traffic.

Note to self: Add video AND slide shows to the site.

Which one do you think will be easier to produce?

I’m an old hand at reading site stats going back to when I crunched log files with analog, then parsed them with Clicktraks to adding javascript tags from urchin (now Google Analytics). But, the real question comes down to what do you with the site stats once you have them. Or, how do the site stats change what you do. To work on that, I started reading Web Analytics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik this weekend to help me learn more about who is visiting my website.

And then, today, Mindy McAdams makes a great post how she is using Feedburner stats about her blog to know who to design to. As in what monitor resolution and what browser she should optimize her blog design to. Her blog stats only reflect the users that visit her blog (not the web as a whole) and she does have a more technical audience, but it is interesting to see how a third of her visitors are now using Firefox 2.0.