The big launch: a whole new ncpr.org
The new ncpr.org is launched. Artist: Carey Rockwell from Danger in Deep Space, a Tom Corbett Space Cadet Adventure, public domain
If you have visited NCPR in the last few days, you will have found a lot of changes. On Tuesday night Bill Haenel flipped the last set of switches to launch the first complete redesign of NCPR since about 1914 (in internet years). It’s been a little lively around here ever since as we address issues that didn’t show their heads until after we went live, and as we fix up old pages, sections and navigation to work properly with the new design. That process will continue for a while, so I hope you will bear with us during our shakedown cruise.
But the site is working well enough on most devices and browsers to be let out in public and I wanted a chance to brag on Bill’s accomplishments a bit. The first big deal in my mind is the new home page. The old design featured a few curated and promoted items at the top, and most of the rest of the content was brought to the page through whatever happened to be newest in the particular feed that put stuff into that particular box. That meant that most items on our most heavily visited page were there “just because,” and were not selected and curated by a human editor to suit our audience. Some features that didn’t update often carried some very outdated stories, and some contained stories that just didn’t work inside the old site design. Bad robot.
No more. If you go to our home page now you will find at this moment 33 stories, posts, photo features, videos and audio features from NCPR and from our public media partners that were selected from among the hundreds of items available to be the best, or the most important, or the most interesting features available. If you want to see everything produced by NCPR News, go to the news page; if you want just the best and the most timely, you will find it on the home page. And if you want more than these 33 items, you can load in more, and they will still be hand curated from among all the sources we tap.
The other big thing I like about the home page is that you can actually use all the content directly from the page, without going to a different page to read the whole story, or listen to the whole story, or watch the video, or share it with your friends. Using the read, listen, watch, or share buttons on a home page story will bring it all forward into view. This a real innovation and will save visitor’s time and a lot of extra navigation and page loading and backtracking when they want to browse through a number of items.
And unlike the old site, this one will adapt itself to the size of the device you are viewing it on. So win, win, win, in my humble opinion. The media players are based on newer technology. The photos display larger than ever before, if you are on a large screen. Content types we couldn’t display properly before, such as First Listen album previews, video collections and NPR slideshows now work properly for the first time. And there’s lots more to come, including stories from public media network and program sources we couldn’t tap before.
I could go on and on, but the best way to get the idea is to explore for yourself. Play Lucinda Williams new double album, which the rest of world won’t see until Monday. Watch John Hodgman, at the behest of his secret ape overlord, put Tweedy out on the street to hawk their new release door to door. Read the NPR ombudsman’s take on the ethics of language used in reporting on terrorism. Meet an Adirondack couple whose solution to funding high winter heating costs is outside of the box. And more.
This had been a huge job with Bill Haenel doing all the heavy lifting–a full year in the works. And did I say?–It looks simply marvelous.
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Dale says: “This had been a huge job with Bill Haenel doing all the heavy lifting–a full year in the works. And did I say?–It looks simply marvelous.”
I agree. The new site looks terrific and, for me, it worked right out of the box (as they say). Congratulations to both of you on an excellent redesign!
Loaded with features but not mobile friendly. Needs at least 6 headlines per screen (see huff post or nyt) and there’s no segregation between local/national/world news. This may be your undoing and I think readership will drop quickly. The site takes forever to load. Launch was premature and more testing should have been done. Overall it’s a step back from the old site. Comment interface is not mobile friendly
I am not a big fan… for a several reasons: 1) looks like a tumblr page; 2) the fact that it is more image oriented, for those of us with dsl it has a sluggish load; 3) when you get an e-mail or link, the page doesn’t always open to that page (this is especially true with comments); and 4) be design or not, the underwriting looks equal to articles.
I will come to love it, I am sure.
I just hope that releasing it a couple weeks before you are asking for money, doesn’t hurt the contributions
Looks sloppy. Like Peter said there is no segregation.
I sent an e-mail to through the regular e-mail channels, couldn’t make a go of it in this venue on my IPAD, Peter above sums it up well.
Out with the new and in with the old, also what is with the expansion of so called news items in Montreal!
Ditto the above.
I am not a fan of the redesign. NCPR was always one of my sites for news updates and information, but since the new launch I visit it rarely. The site does not load well on some mobile platforms and with lower and slower data speeds I find in the Adirondacks the image heavy site does not load well, if at all.
I also wish the news was better segmented into local, national, arts and calendar events as it was previously. The drop down menus are difficult to navigate. The colors and simplicity is fine, but I will hope additional design and reorganization will occur.
Dale, Despite the preponderance of negativism with regard to the newest rendition of NCPR’s web page keep the following in mind when it comes to “new” ideas, as one one can expect some cyclic rendition of the following stages:
1. This is worthless, the old was much much better
2. This appears to be true, the old was still better
3. This does work, the old way was easier
4. This has always been the way it worked
5. Why did you change it?
Pete says: “Launch was premature and more testing should have been done.” and “Comment interface is not mobile friendly”
We’ve been holding off the launch for months as we worked our way through the mammoth number of issues involved in converting 14 years worth of stories and pages into a new format. Some things cannot be discovered in a test environment–slow loading on certain devices, for example–will not show up until you go live and put the new system under a traffic load.
The comment interface on mobile is out of it’s proper position at the bottom of the story text on phone-sized screens. It appears well separated from the story by other content. This was a very late part of our roll-out and is a problem we will fix soon.
Dale Hobson, NCPR
NorthCountryEdu says: “I also wish the news was better segmented into local, national, arts and calendar events as it was previously.”
This was a conscious choice on our part. Segmenting the stories into buckets and stacking the buckets up in the old design meant that only a few items were seen by most visitors, and most of them were regional news features. NCPR serves both a news and an arts and entertainment audience. We wanted a front page that reflected the diversity of our offerings better. We provide collection pages that do bring all those threads together, most one click away from the home page. The news page, the calendar page, the Arts and Music topic page, etc. But we wanted the discretion to highlight all kinds of different stories “above the fold.”
You may notice the little “source” labels in the upper left of each story tile. Clicking any of them (such as “In Box” “The Two-Way” All Songs TV”) will take you to collection pages where you find all stories from (respectively), NCPR’s In Box news blog, NPR’s The Two-Way news blog, and NPR’s All Songs TV music video collection.
Dale Hobson, NCPR
Dick Gagnon asks “What is with the expansion of so called news items in Montreal!”
NCPR serves southern Ontario up to the outskirts of Ottawa and Quebec into the western and southern suburbs of Montreal. We frequently report on events in Canada, particularly when they are relevant to issues faced in the U.S. as well as Canada. And we have done since before I came on board in 2001. Canadians listen and visit and donate. Why wouldn’t we?
Dale Hobson, NCPR
PirateEdwardLow says: 1) looks like a tumblr page; 2) the fact that it is more image oriented, for those of us with dsl it has a sluggish load; 3) when you get an e-mail or link, the page doesn’t always open to that page (this is especially true with comments); and 4) be design or not, the underwriting looks equal to articles.
The image-rich orientation comes from our findings on traffic to stories that were text-only–very low. In our testing, the new page loaded faster that our old one on desktop machines, the additional images were outweighed by more efficient coding and smarter timing of delivering content to the portion of the page currently in view. But in the real world environment, we are seeing sluggish loading on some mobile devices and will keep tweeking the page to get better mobile performance.
We made the decision to only expand the comments and the comment form into view when someone clicked on the comment link on a story. But this did have the effect of making the link in comment confirmation emails not work to jump the viewer down the page to the specific comment location. I’m not sure if there is a fix for this, but we will look into it.
We felt that given the fact that broadcast and online underwriters contribute about one-fourth of the station’s operating income, we were giving them pretty short shrift online in the old design, a tiny horizontal rectangle in the sidebar. The new underwriting space is roughly four times larger, which does make it look as large as a story tile on a phone-sized screen, but we are confident that we are making them sufficiently different in appearance from stories that no one will mistake one for an article.
Dale Hobson, NCPR