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.
You didn’t notice? That they use CSS only to make the text pretty, and not to partition the page into sections, i.e. they use tables for layouts.
Not wrong, and yet… I thought we were beyond this.
Looks like The Star is now rising in Ping Ping Land after languishing in the doldrums for as long as living memory.
I’m not really sure if my post was refering to the design specifically but if they’re using CSS to control the text then it’ll take less than even a day to do the tweaks mentioned. :)
The Star online is really good for me in Melbourne. Though I can only read so much since the full online paper is a paid service. Oh well..
One of my colleagues went around the office asking people for their opinions on the website. He said they were going to revamp the site and he wanted quotes for a newspaper supplement pullout they were preparing to coincide with the website’s 10th anniversary.
We found out that none of our feedback would be taken into consideration in building the new site. They only wanted to hear positive and happy things. When all he got was a list of all the stuff that could be corrected/improved, he said, “Don’t you guys have anything good to say?”
After that, we were wondering, “What’s the point?”
I don’t know how they came up with the new design or whether they polled actual users to find out what readers would like to see there. I hope they did, though.
Gd entry. Now i notice the flaws..
The layout breaks if you have pictures turned off (I do, because I’m on REALLY SLOW DIALUP GRR ARGH).
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v59/mydemand/thestarwithoutpictures.jpg
@Irene
It could’ve been a rush job for all we know. It’s possible that the revamp wasn’t even done by their own team but outsourced to a company outside. If they didn’t want to ask for public feedback, they could’ve done in-house user testing. :)
@RAY:
Thanks. Though mine’s only from one point of the view.
@Tiara:
Hey, haven’t been seeing you around lately. :) Thanks for reminding me about Disabling the Images to check. I’ll edit the entry and credit you. No worries.
As for the reason of the break, I think it’s because they only use images as buttons for the top menu. This can be solved if they had used CSS actually. And because of that minor flaw, the whole layout actually got pushed upwards. The second menu stays there, probable reason is they used CSS absolute positioning property or something like it.
And it just hit me. Not many people would even know how to disable the image from loading since many still are using Internet Explorer instead of other browsers that provides that function. So if the website is slow, it just doesn’t get loaded completely and the user would just have a bad experience.
I’ve been using LJ more…but I do read your RSS feed ;)
Internet Explorer does offer the function to disable images – it should be somewhere in the Tools menu.
Ahh.. LiveJournal. Alright. I’ve gotta learn more about RSS feeds/readers. :)
Found the way to disable pictures in Internet Explorer. Though it’s a bit of a hassle cause people need to go into Tools > Advanced > scroll to Multimedia > uncheck Show Pictures. Bummer!
Oh, they weren’t asking for public feedback. They were asking employees. I work for that company. :P
Wait wait! So you’re telling me that your company did The Star website? :S
No, I’m saying I work for [removed upon request]. I’m one of their feature writers. I guess I’m almost too good at being ambiguous and vague, huh? *grin* I usually try not to mention the company’s name and my name in the same sentence online… not that I’m all that anonymous, it’s just something I don’t write about very much. Better safe than sorry, you know.
Ahh, okies. Well, if you need me to edit the name of the company out, just lemme know. Cheers.
Oh, no worries. As long as Google doesn’t associate my URL with my full name, I’m fine :) I do openly tell people I’m a journalist with That Paper if I meet them IRL and I’ve mentioned my job on my blog several times, although in my blog I’ve been careful not to say which company I work for. My boss warned me to keep my blog personal…
Well, good to hear your boss is actually open about it. :)
Anyway, user testing for commercial websites actually is very valuable though not many do it because it’s quite time consuming. It takes at least a day to do it even for in-house personnel. A book that I learned alot about true usability is from Steve Krugg’s Don’t Make Me Think with a lot of touches from Jakob Nielsen too and others.
Yeah but what irked me was that they wanted only positive, glowing, happy quotes from us staff and discarded the suggestions or criticism as if it didn’t exist. It was so obviously a plan to blow one’s own trumpet, proclaiming that the website is so great and so wonderful. Somehow nobody realises that saying that or putting it in print doesn’t make it any truer, and that users will see through the rhetoric because all the PR campaigns in the world can’t magic away usability issues.
Hmm… maybe it would be good to edit out the name of the company in my earlier comment, after all *rolls eyes*
But anyway the new site is a great improvement over the old site, which I’m really happy to see. I wasn’t sure how the new one would turn out since they didn’t seem to be taking our comments into account. Maybe they polled readers from outside; I don’t know.
Editing has been done. :)
Well, only way to find out how many people visit The Star online and what they think of it is have a personal poll then run that directly to the editor or webmaster. If that doesn’t get their attention, I’ll just have to seek help from international people for their views. ROFL!
Thanks, Danny. I was sort of half-joking, you know :)
ROFL — good luck!!
I’m not serious about the poll and getting professional views anyway. Reason is because I’ve got more important things like my own career and my own methods of teaching my clients later. There are those who listen and those who just behave like mules.
I’m hoping when my career has expanded and taken me to where I plan to be in a decade or so, then these commercial bodies would actually listen. :)
Cheers and same goes to you.
I really cannot remember The Star online had occur that long. Actually, Yahoo and a lot of other US company only celebrates 10 Anniversary this year or last year. Our The Star online born more early than Yahoo?
Hmm.. *checks archive*
Come to think of it. You might be right Peter. According to Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, The Star Online has only been around since 1997. I wonder how’d they accumulate a decade.
Oh well, there’s freebies so I ain’t complaining. ;)