The New York Post just launched their redesign earlier this week. First impression - looks like CNN except a lot busier. Newsweek, Target, and Macys also use a similiar color scheme. They all use a color scheme of greys and just a tiny bit of red for highlights. It's nice a color scheme. I wonder if they're all designed by the same design firm - probably not because the Post's design is too cluttered in comparison to the others.
I actually liked New York Post's previous design. It was simple, looks like a newspaper, and has a retro feel to it. It was also clean. When I was designing Wopular, it was one of the sites I look to for inspiration.
The newer version does have an updated Web 2.0 look to it. The main navigation, located at the header, is broken up into four main sections - News, Page Six, Sports, and Entertainment. When mouseover-ed, they expand to reveal highlighted news items and subsections. I like how when you're in a subpage, those modules display a teaser for the main story in each section. It's a good way to cycle through content from other sections of the site to a user viewing a deeply buried article. It's useful, but a bit bulky. It pushes the main content, the articles, further down the page. I find the placement of the article tabs - comments, photo, video - a waste of article space on the left. Because most articles tend to be pretty long, they leave a noticeable gap. It's better placed horizontally, like most conventional websites. Subpages also have modules for photo galleries, videos, and popular articles on the right sidebar - a requisite for content sites nowadays.
Because it's so busy, it does seem to have more content. It's a tough balancing act. How do you let people know that there's a ton of content without making it look cluttered. I tend to go with the busy approach. People are looking for content so it doesn't hurt to let them know that you have lots of it. It's also great for search engines because there are more links to follow, which means more pages will be indexed. Still, I think CNN does a better job with that balance.
Overall, the site's a bit too busy and the color scheme's not very original, but it does seem to be updated with the latest Web 2.0 features. It doesn't look like a relic of old newspaper sites, that's for sure. Speaking of which, it's probably time for me to add some of that Web 2.0 juice to my Wopular.
