CNN.com Relaunch

CNN.com's new website design is accessible, but not pretty. Entering the new site, the viewer is stunned by a large, bold header featuring four shades of red. Immediately under that, bold black boxes feature current video stories. If you make it past all of this, however, the site features a number of photographs and videos which successfully catch the viewer's attention and the amount of text on the page is easily readable. The website also highlights a wide range of topics. Their goal was to continue to feature breaking news, but also focus more on in-depth stories, entertainment, video commentary and tv material, which I think they've successfully done.

I like the fact that the site is laid out in a grid format though I don't think it was executed as well as it could have been. The layout on the top half of the homepage feels bulky and unbalanced. Similarly, the 3x3 grid on the bottom of the page listing of all of the sections borders on overwhelming, though I can see how it would be useful for navigation purposes. Once you navigate further into the site, the aesthetics improve (ie- return to the original style).

As a side note, I am a big fan of being able to customize the site and feature the information that I care about. I think a lot of people will utilize this option. It was also interesting to read in the article that a lot of redesign was based on user data CNN collected; I would be interested to learn more about how this data was collected and interpreted.

Overall, some good ideas (such as incorporating more visuals), but not great style.