The Star Online

Celebrates its 10th Anniversary with a revamp to its website. They’ve moved forward by lessening the many navigation links for a menu and kinda shorten the whole vertical scrolling effort. If you’d like to know what its previous website looked like, click HERE. Please be warned that the image size is 773 x 2076 pixels.

That aside, let’s have a look at the new layout that you can view online HERE. The redesign sports a slightly curved navigation for the top menu and a cleaned up secondary navigation bar below the banner. The navigation has been really cleaned up by employing the use of dropdown menus to each parent category. The colors used for the buttons are attractive and remains readable. Sporting a good sign for usability.

They’ve also taken away the default underlined links and made them only active when hovered. If you noticed, there isn’t anymore need for extensive vertical scrolling. The layout actually maintains its 4-column persona but has been slightly altered. Now, the main content has been placed on the left and more images are placed around creating an invisible box of focus. Next to the latest local update, more priority has been devised towards the World news too.

Two things have surprised me though. The first being the search function. It’s gone. 0.0 It used to be on the left but now its disappeared from the face of the homepage. The other thing that has gone ‘kaput!’ is The Spotlight column.

Overall, I must congratulate to a job well handled for The Star team in the redesign. They’ve definetely pulled it off by making the website even easier to navigate. However, I still feel that that are few common usability problems and should’ve stuck with the old design in some way. I’d also like to point out first that I’m comparing usability against the CNN website.

An example of better usability, the team should have stuck with the underlined links. The green headers isn’t enough to distinguish each section cause my eyes scanned text without a pause. It’s like I’m reading through a whole parargraph. What I think the team should’ve done was either used a bigger font or have a line cut below the titles of News, Business, Sports and Technology.

Why doesn’t the titles of Property, Motoring and Entertainment feel the same like the above? Well, it’s because you have more white space distinguishing each of them.

I’m not sure if anyone would think the same, but wouldn’t it be good to make the main article title clickable as well? And guess what? I found the search. It was hidden inside the website after you click into it.

These are small issues that The Star wouldn’t have a problem dealing within a week or so if they choose to alter anything. The other thing I’m just wondering now, if they had reveloped the website in full CSS, would it actually help load the website faster? Hmm..

Oh well, kudos to The Star Online team and happy celebrating to a job well done. Hope the next revamp will kick bigger ass and probably shock even CNN.

Tiara spotted a weird issue with The Star website too. When viewing with images turned off, the layout was pushed upwards.

Comments

Have something to say? Leave a comment