Is it me....or is it Jalopnik's website???

Tim Baxter wrote: Fried, comparing the before and after, I think it's hit and miss. I think the old one is pretty bad. It's dated, slow, appears broken, and is fairly difficult to navigate around. The new one looks better and is much faster, but... I think they've over-emphasized social media stuff, especially out of context. You don't want people to leave your site to go follow you on twitter or FB, you want them to post your content to FB and twitter to bring more folks BACK to the site. I think it doesn't play nice on small monitors. I think too much content is hidden away behind some menu or another, and the designer was way too excited by what he could do gadget-wise. Present the content first, then worry bout the frills. It's still difficult to navigate, just in a new and different way. I hate the photo/article scroller thingy. Annoying and in the way. One definition of good design is that it bridges the gap between the business needs and desires and the visitor needs and desires. That one doesn't. It was just somebody trying to make something "cool". Neither the business nor the visitor is getting what they want. And the story pages look like an afterthought. The photos have no sense of flow, and it's obvious whoever did it had no sense of typography whatsoever. Still like it better than the old one, but I think they missed the mark pretty badly. I think it'll feel really dated really soon, and I think they'll really, really wonder why they downplayed the content so much, since they are ostensibly a content company.

Thanks for the critique, Tim. I suppose I should admit that I turn 49yrs old next month, and that I'm not like most modern internet users. IIRC, I bought my first home computer and logged on to this (then) new world of communications in 1995 or so. I'm still so amazed that I can find so much information by just playing around on my keyboard that I don't really mind old website design. I have to admit..sometimes, I actually prefer the internet of the mid-1990s to the current day..it seems that every time I place a query into Google nowdays, the first 209,384,752,093 (yes, that's an exaggeration) results are commercial interests trying to sell me something slightly related to my query, instead of pages that actually have something of value to share with the world.

Fried, I miss those days, too.

Honestly, if they had asked me, I would have told them that first thing, DON'T redesign. Redesigns are needlessly disruptive and irrational. They're driven by bad decisions sold by people who don't know what they're talking about, to people who are impressed by something shiny, and they throw the good things out with the bad.

And before you go changing anything, you need to understand what is working AND WHY, and what isn't working, and why. Are you under-utilizing? Does nobody know how to do it properly, is it just something nobody REALLY cares about? Many times you don't need a redesign, you need staff training so the current design lives up to its capabilities.

Only once you've identified what's good, what's bad, and what's simply a matter of untrained staff doing things half-assed should you even look at changing things, and even then you don't want to redesign, you want to iterate and test, iterate and test, iterate and test.

On motorsports.com, I would have focused on speed, typography and mildly freshening the old site bit by bit. Over the course of 6 months (about what the typical redesign takes anyway) I would have brought it up to date, but inch by inch, and with every change being considered and tested one at a time.

Looks like a new canoe shop just opened up. If you're gonna open up a canoe shop, could it be about racing canoes? That would be AWESOME!

Take your pick or

PseudoSport wrote:

DUDE! That made me laugh SO HARD! Well done, you win 20 internet points.

PseudoSport wrote:

I wonder if I can get a T shirt with that on it.

quit it canoeing canoe biatch

I think any link to jalopcrap is a canoe, but we don't need any Phoakleys or Tiphany crap either.

BTW, resurrecting because they've gotten on my last nerve. So, their site still sucks and still doesn't work very well (at least it doesn't crash my browser) The scroll box on the right works pretty well until you visit a story, then you only see a portion of the scroll box, you can't go back to fix it, you have reload the entire site. Brilliant.

I thought it was funny that they were excited over the numbers of visitors they've gotten lately. When you look at the data, you see that it is just now getting above where they were before redesign. Add to this that if you actually remember the commenting there before and what it is like now, you realize that the community is gone and they are only focused on brief site visits versus building a community.

Finally, I find that Ray Wert is kind of a dick and his attitude has now caused me to boycott any Gawker site from here on out. I used to enjoy Lifehacker, Gizmodo and Jalopnik. Lots of interesting information and entertainment to be had there, but the sites just don't have that anymore, so I'll go elsewhere and never visit their sites again.

Now back to GRM, which is my favorite site in the world because it is the best online community, nay family around!

Don't mind the resurrection, because it gives me a chance to ask PseudoSport if he minds telling us where the "Crazy Canoer" image is hosted (don't do it if it'll bust your bandwidth limit, dude!), so that we can all use it. That thing is brilliant.

I came up with it in MS paint while I was bored at work one day. Its made up of the image on the back of the old GRM shirt and the 5th image that comes up when you search "Canoe" on google images.

Feel free to use it if you like, its also in my readers rides.

http://rides.webshots.com/album/578229058?vhost=rides&start=84

turboswede wrote: Finally, I find that Ray Wert is kind of a dick

+1 There's too much sanctimonious and/or snarky stuff happening on that site now days.

Absolutely. It seems to me that they use car stuff as small talk while pushing a political agenda. That turned me off pretty bad.

Mix that with a bad design and... why bother?