Irish Times Website Redesign

thier

How's it no one has complained about this yet...

The King of Moo

We were waiting for someone to come along with a link to the website and their own opinion on the redesign.

And we still are.

Bipolar Joe

Because everyone is busy pretending they don't read the Indo.

B.A._Baracus

The King of Moo wrote: »

We were waiting for someone to come along with a link to the website and their own opinion on the redesign.

And we still are.

Is it mandatory to be sarcastic and rude to every new thread on after hours? It's becoming the common theme on here.

.Henry Sellers.

thier wrote: »

How's it no one has complained about this yet...

You first.

thier

.Henry Sellers. wrote: »

You first.

I don't like it. It's not as easy to get a quick snapshot of the news headlines in one glance. The articles are too widely spaced or something... And actually, it looks a lot like the Indo's website, but surely there's no connection.

The King of Moo

B.A._Baracus wrote: »

Is it mandatory to be sarcastic and rude to every new thread on after hours? It's becoming the common theme on here.

To every lazy or stupid thread, yes.

.Henry Sellers.

thier wrote: »

I don't like it. It's not as easy to get a quick snapshot of the news headlines in one glance. The articles are too widely spaced or something... And actually, it looks a lot like the Indo's website, but surely there's no connection.

I agree.

B.A._Baracus

The King of Moo wrote: »

To every lazy or stupid thread, yes.

Then that would mean every thread on here.
For the record i'm not just raggin' on you It's just every single thread in after hours is just met with sarcastic / thank whore / etc replies. Unless its moaning about the public sector or people of the dole.

batistuta9

thier wrote: »

I don't like it. It's not as easy to get a quick snapshot of the news headlines in one glance. The articles are too widely spaced or something... And actually, it looks a lot like the Indo's website, but surely there's no connection.

It websites being redesigned with touchscreen's in mind

you'll see more & more of it

Zaph

thier wrote: »

How's it no one has complained about this yet...

Ahem...

dh0011

i agree with you OP. Dont like it at all.

catallus

Neither do I. It was actually fine and navigable as it was.

Cereal Number

What a balls up of "New-Coke" proportions, they may as well have stuck The Daily Mail on the top. That is one website I will no longer be visiting.

J_E

What's with the strangely-coloured bar and blank space on top? Looks rather ugly. Not sure I'm a fan of this new look...

hatrickpatrick

Why do so many websites these days seem to think getting rid of the navigation bar that lets you jump to general sections is a good idea? It just makes it harder to find stories that aren't top headlines O_o

IM0

Im guessing it was a cluttered mess before, where as now its easy to read and uncluttered. youre one of 'those' arent you

Ruudi_Mentari

Tacky design has not invaded your home...

it has merely invaded the device, which has invaded your home and I urge you to not become irritated by this.

osarusan

Irish Times Website Redesign...

is fookin horrible beyond belief. Too many pictures, not enough actual news. Scrolling down the homepage gives me a headache. Go to sections within the site (like the sports section) and it looks just the same - all pictures, very little news.

The whole site has this weird whitespace at the top and sides, and a blast of colour images mashed together in the middle.

They haven't managed to fix their comments section to make it easier to find your own posts and reply to others (as far as I can see, I wonder if there is a way i don't know about).

Fookin horrible.

Clickster

It's awful! Loved the way it was!! I'm in oz and I always check it and the generation emigration section is no longer free to read online! WTF!

mconigol

I like it, hated the old one so never went on, might actually start using it as a news source once again.

Could do with more headlines on the front page though and lose some of the clutter. Note sure why photos of the hairdressing championship needs to be so prominent!

Edit: Oh and lose the banner ad at the top, hate when websites do that. Very distracting

Sergeant

Like all website redesigns I'll hate it for a few days until I start to forget what the old version looked like. Then I'll go grow to like it, and will invariably complain when they next redesign it in a few years.

opinion guy

Sergeant wrote: »

Like all website redesigns I'll hate it for a few days until I start to forget what the old version looked like. Then I'll go grow to like it, and will invariably complain when they next redesign it in a few years.

Its called Facebook syndrome

I get all my news from Google News and various RSS feeds that I've subscribed to through my phone, so I couldn't care less what their website looks like.

Tombo2001

They've decided not to put good money and valuable content and effort into something that nobody pays for.

Good luck to them.......glad to see common sense prevail for a change.

RainyDay

I hate the splitting of some articles into two pages - extra clicks and extra delays, particularly when mobile. And what happened to the 'Ireland' category heading? That was my 'landing point' on the website before. The Ireland stories were the ones I generally wanted to read.

Gorilla Rising

I'm going to steal a wheelchair from Beaumont and sit outside their offices for 45mins. One of my mates will make up a story about how they won't listen to my ideas because I'm in a wheelchair.

I plan on getting someone sacked too.

Teyla Emmagan

I hates it!!! It looks really American and cheap.

Come to think of it, the old design was probably ****e too, but I was used to it.

Capri

At least the IT has attempted to explain it''s changes - the Indo doesn't give a fig

Building an Irish Times website for the new digital era

The online editor on redesigning irishtimes.com and differentiating it from the printed newspaper


Over the last few days, The Irish Times has been implementing some of the most significant technical changes in its history. In the printed newspaper, these changes won’t have a significant effect on how our articles appear, although they will allow us to do some things more efficiently.

Online users will have noticed the new design of the website, which went live on Saturday. The developments include new colours and fonts, better picture presentation and mobile-friendly responsive design.

More fundamentally, we’re changing the way we push content to the web. Up until now, over 60 per cent of the articles published on irishtimes.com arrived there via a direct feed of text and images from the printed newspaper, uploaded overnight once the print edition had been completed. This (by modern standards) relatively crude process meant our content lacked many of the attributes users expect from a modern website – hyperlinks and tagging, for example. Our new system will allow us to add this value at source for the first time.

This will allow us to group our content in ways that make sense online. For example, where previously you might have had to search across several different sections to find coverage of a particular political issue, now political news, analysis, and opinion can all be found in our Politics section. And if you want to catch up with what Miriam Lord or Fintan OToole have been writing, you can see all our regular columnists here.

It also means that we will no longer be putting the entire edition of the newspaper online overnight. Instead, we’ll be publishing continuously over the 24-hour cycle, seven days a week, reflecting the reality of how content is found, consumed and shared on digital platforms. From now on, different variants of articles may appear in print and online, tailored to the needs of the respective audiences. Some newspaper content may not be published online at all, and some online content will not appear in the print edition. While we recognise some of our readers would prefer an exact digital replica of the daily newspaper, we believe those requirements are better served by our epaper or Kindle editions.

Our new systems allow us to optimise content for online use. At the top of each article, for example, you’ll see ’Topics’ tags. These relate to key individuals, organisations, places and themes referenced in the piece and they link to other articles on those subjects. Also, if you click on the author’s name, you’ll be brought to that writer’s profile page, where you’ll be able to see their other work and, in many cases, follow them on Twitter.

With these new tools at our disposal, we’ve made some fundamental changes to the architecture of irishtimes.com. In some cases, we’ve introduced new sections, such as Crime and Law. In others, we’ve brought more detail than was previously possible, so our international coverage now specifies regions such as the US, Europe or the Middle East. Our Health section, which previously only contained articles from Tuesday’s Health and Family supplement, now includes all out health-related articles throughout the week.

We have also implemented a significant redesign, based on our understanding of data about user behaviour on the site, along with analysis of how the overall digital media landscape is changing. Those changes are happening very fast - we anticipate that very soon over 50 per cent of our audience will be accessing irishtimes.com via mobile devices. That has significant implications which we need to take on board.

A development of this scale inevitably prompts many reactions, both positive and negative, and we’ve had plenty of both since our relaunch. We have had a few teething problems with our new systems as we roll them out this week. These have had some negative impact on our online publishing to the website and our News app since the weekend. We are working very hard to resolve these as quickly as possible and to get our digital platforms functioning fully. It’s unfortunate that the redesigned site has been adversely affected by these technical problems, which have delayed the publication of our content over the last three days, but I’m hopeful that we can fix these relatively soon. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please post them below and I’ll do my best to answer as comprehensively and promptly as I can.

oceanfroggie

But it is NOT mobile friendly. It's a disaster because you can't pinch and zoom.

Aside from the the navigation is not intuitive.

Bye bye IT online hello RTE & BBC

Capri

If I go to my local shop at 7am to buy an Indo or I Times I don't expect to buy a paper that has 50% of yesterday's paper in it . I want 100% of today's paper TODAY. What these websites are giving us is a drip of new news interspersed with a lot of old news. It'd probably be fair to say that the only time I can read ALL of what was in the 7am printed edition is about 4pm online :mad:

osarusan

Capri wrote: »

If I go to my local shop at 7am to buy an Indo or I Times I don't expect to buy a paper that has 50% of yesterday's paper in it . I want 100% of today's paper TODAY. What these websites are giving us is a drip of new news interspersed with a lot of old news. It'd probably be fair to say that the only time I can read ALL of what was in the 7am printed edition is about 4pm online :mad:

With the way they dripfeed news on the website, you'd swear they actually want you to buy the newspaper instead or something!

opinion guy

Well I can tell you my views of the IT site have gone down dramatically since they redesigned it - its just too hard to find stuff now

Miss Lockhart

I've given up on it altogether now. I used to read it every morning but it's a waste of time now. I won't be buying the paper either.

Dave!

oceanfroggie wrote: »

But it is NOT mobile friendly. It's a disaster because you can't pinch and zoom.

Aside from the the navigation is not intuitive.

Bye bye IT online hello RTE & BBC

ehh you're not supposed to be able to pinch and zoom - that's the idea of responsive design, the elements on the page are all resized to fit your device. If a responsive website requires pinch & zoom, then it's not responsive.

IsaacWunder

Presumably the Irish Times, realising that most people were only spending time on the website in the mornings to get the stories from yesterday, aimed to shake things up and spread those visits throughout the day by removing the overnight stories from the newspaper.

This is the flawed logic of the owner of a café who, upon realising that most of his customers come in to get a cup of something in the morning but rarely pop in to have a sandwich in the afternoon, decides to spread visits throughout the day by stopping selling coffee.

The problem is, at that point, he's no longer running a café, so has lost his loyal customer base who come in every morning for a cup of something and maybe grab a pastry. They weren't obliged to come there for a coffee; they chose to come there. And once they're gone, they're going to be very difficult to bring back.

The reason I choose the Irish Times website over, let's say, RTE was because the Irish Times (the self-styled paper of record) did cover everything every morning.

And instead of adding more features to get visitors like me to come back in the afternoon/evening (such as more opinion pieces from someone other than their boring old columnists, live blogs. Basically just rip-off the Guardian.co.uk site) they removed the reason most visitors came to the site in the first place.

Since this stupidity I've switched to the Examiner because it still does what I'd expect from the website of an Irish newspaper: give me detailed reports of what happened in the world yesterday without having to thrawl through heaps of pointless links and stories.

Worztron

Looks better now.

General General

Irish Times has entered its death spiral. Its status as a paper of record is open to debate & even if it were, that's becoming meaningless.

They know it too... fortunately for us, there's no Irish Times licence that everyone has to pay.