In the summer I wrote a post vaguely complaining about the deterioration in the design of Barack Obama’s campaign website.

Here is the site when it first launched early in 2007:

I liked this. The design was clean and the site was really easy to navigate. After initially launching this version, the campaign spent a few months developing tons of great new features which they didn’t really have a place to put.

(more…)

Cyberjournalist has the scoop on the BBC launching a beta version of their redesigned homepage. You can view the beta site here and the current version here. Note that this redesign affects only the main BBC homepage and not the BBC News homepage, which is where I spend most of my time.

A quick perusal of the new homepage shows that the BBC is trying to turn its homepage into an Ajax style start page like Netvibes or Pageflakes. I’m not opposed to the idea, but the execution here is pretty poor. The whole thing is clunky, but what really jumps out is how poorly designed the customization options are.

Here is what it looks like out of the box:

I’m not a fan of magenta, so I immediately clicked on the Display Option link at the top to try to make a magenta-free version. After clicking that you are given the options to select from eight preset color schemes or create your own. Sounds great. The problem is that all the preset options look absolutely terrible. (more…)

On Saturday, MSNBC launched a redesigned version of its website (via Cyberjournalist). You can view some reader reaction here and take a tour of the new site here.

I’ve never been a fan of the MSNBC website. While I think the new design is an improvement from a design perspective, the site has a long way to go before I’ll be converted into a regular visitors. Here are my specific criticisms of the new design and the overall site strategy.

(1) The navigation on the new site isn’t very user friendly. For me, the banner at the top of the page is useless from a navigation perspective. Instead of just providing me with a nice breakdown of the content of the site in the header, MSNBC uses the entire thing to advertise the sites of the Today Show and Dateline. The actual site navigation has been de-emphasized and placed at the bottom left area of the page, meaning many, many users will be scrolling to find the Health and Weather sections on the homepage. (more…)

I was doing some work on Google and did a quick search for Barack Obama. I wanted to go to his main campaign site, so I clicked on the ad that shows up as the first result. I often find just typing search phrases in Google quicker than trying to type in a URL or sort through where I have the site bookmarked.

Not surprisingly, I got taken to a page designed specifically for Google Adwords that encourages me to join the Obama mail list. Below is a screenshot of the landing page.

This is pretty typical. The only thing interesting here is that the page doesn’t include any obvious way to opt out of the sign up process. Most of the time when you do these sorts of pages you get the little “Skip to go to Website” option. Want to to go to the website? Can’t get there from here. It seems to be designed in a way that conveys that the only option is to sign up. (more…)

The Bivings group is jumping on the ActionScript 3.0 bandwagon, and our clients are coming along for the ride, apparently it's a fast one…

This language is pretty new to everyone and we want to be a pioneer in creating more dynamic and smoother apps for our clients using this awesome new language. ActionScript lends us the power to create animated and interactive content programatically, thus reducing the footprint of our projects and resulting in more stable and reliable applications.

There are many ways to do the same things in flash. Part of being creative in flash is not only about how you visually design the elements in your application, but how efficient you are, in other words, how small you can make the file size. Following is an example of what I am talking about. The file on the left was done using ActionScript and the file on the right was faked using motion tweens, As you can see the left one much smaller in file size, it is also smoother and more responsive. The ActionScript version is 4kb and the tween version is 12kb… that's 3x smaller, cool.

Also, this little fact stood out the most in a sea of specs and Adobe documentation. "ActionScript 3.0 code can execute up to ten times faster than legacy ActionScript code!" And faster is better when it comes to loading!

Regular readers of this blog know that we are part of the web development team working on the Fred Thompson website, www.imwithfred.com. On Monday afternoon, the team launched a new version of the site. Frankly, I’m too tired to write up a good entry summarizing all the new features so I’m going to cheat and just link out:

(1) The Fred File blog has a good breakdown of what has been added.

(2) Patrick Bell over at TechRepublican makes note of my favorite part of the new site, the Volunteer HQ section that features a log of all activities a volunteer completes. He calls this section “much more advanced than anything I think I’ve seen by the announced candidates.” I’ll take it.

(3) Micah Sifry over at TechPresident sums up the site’s new features pretty well:

I’m With Fred.com” Version 2.0 is up, and the 2.0 is justified. Not only is the redesigned site a hub for news of Fred Thompson’s potential presidential bid and his positions on the issues, the site offers new tools for organizing events in local communities, for creating and exporting contribution and communications widgets to other sites, for registering to vote, and for allowing members to track through their profile pages how well they are doing in recruiting supporters. It’s nicely done–a tribute no doubt to Michael Turk, who techPresident readers know has been agitating for this kind of GOP site for quite some time. One interesting wrinkle–you can’t view comments on the site’s blog without first becoming a “Friend of Fred.

Let me know what you think about the new site in the comments.

Our recent newspaper study dealt exclusively with the features present on newspaper websites. We didn’t look critically at the design of these sites. The adoption of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) makes it possible for web developers to create rich designs while keeping the file size of pages to a minimum.

In looking at newspaper websites, it becomes clear pretty quickly that their homepages are bloated. They try to stick as much data as possible on the homepage (including ads).

Given that, we decided to look at the file sizes of the homepages of the top 10 newspapers, and how much of that file size is devoted to advertising. Note that file size does not always equate to load times. Other factors such as the number of database calls and the quality of the hosting environment play big roles.

These numbers were grabbed using the Firebug Firefox extension. Sizes were recorded both with Adblock on and off, so we can get an idea of how much space is devoted to advertising. (more…)

The Barack Obama campaign has been rolling out new features on its website at an impressive clip. A campaign timeline. Headquarters pages for each of the early primary states. A mobile program. Good stuff and they are clearly doing a wonderful job online.

But in the process of launching this stuff, they’ve turned their clean, nicely designed homepage into a canvas on which to cram as many banner ads as possible. On launch, they had six distinct content areas on their homepage. Today they have eleven elements stuffed into the same space.

Below are the before and after pics. I cast my vote for before.

Before:

After:

Disclosure.

Recently, we launched a blog network for Georgetown Preparatory School's Summer ESL Program .  The purpose of this project was to give the Georgetown Prep teachers a new way to communicate with their students, and to give the students a new way to practice their English language skills. Also, we wanted to give our staff an opportunity to experiment with WordPress Mu (pronounced "mew"), the multi-user blog program.  Just launched on Monday, the students at teachers over at GPrep are already starting to get the hang of things, with three of the seven classes at this year's summer camp taking advantage of the blog.  The best example is Mr. Scronce's blog.  This teacher gives his students a daily topic to write about, related to class discussions or readings.  Currently, the students are reading and discussing the book Kaffir Boy, so they wrote some blog entries about their initial reactions to the book.  The teacher made grammatical corrections using different text colors in each student's blog entry.

For the Georgetown Prep blog network, we set up each class has its own blog, with the teachers registered as "editors" and the students registered as "authors".  These blogs are linked together using blogrolls on the domain gprepblogs.bivings.com.  We tried to keep the site as simple as possible, and did little customized work (we tweaked the colors and header of a WordPress theme but did little else). 

For individual users, WordPress Mu seems to be working great.  Thus far, the teachers and students have had no problems accessing and contributing to their blogs.  I think this speaks to the ease with which WordPress functions: few or none of the people from this group have a lot of experience with computers or technology, and they are able to successfully contribute to an online discussion.

However, from an administrative perspective, things get a bit confusing.  I have a significant amount of experience with the administrative tools within WordPress, so I took on the task of setting up all of the users in the GPrep blog network.  In all, there are 8 blogs, consisting of a total of 8 teachers (editors) and about 90 students (authors).  Since we wanted to simplify the process for the teachers and students using the site, we set up their user accounts ahead of time, using a variation of my personal email address.  This way, all the users had to do was login and start writing.  For me, however, things were a bit more difficult.

Although there is a "site admin" portion of WordPress Mu which gives administrators access to all the backends of all the blogs in the network, the process for signing up new users is a bit clumsy.  First, they have to be registered with the main site.  Then, they have to be added to the blog to which they will be contributing.  So basically, as I was setting up this blog network, I had to add each user to the system twice.  This was annoying.  I suppose this process is easier for individuals who want to register themselves with a WordPress Mu site, but unfortunately we didn't have the luxury of letting people register themselves.

The site navigation is also a bit clumsy from the backend.  It's a little difficult to switch between blogs if you are managing several at the same time.  Once you enter the backend of a blog, there is no way to return to the backend of the main administration panel or to the panels of other blogs without first returning to the live site or typing in the wp-admin URL. 

It was also annoying that I had to manually enter the blogroll 9 times (once on each teacher blog and once on the main site).  I was really hoping that because these blogs were all created under the same umbrella that there would be an automatic way to link them together and aggregate their content.  While our main developer did find eventually find a plugin that publishes the most recent post from each blog on the front page, we didn't find any other way to aggregate the rest of the content, categories, comments, or authors.  This was our developer's major complaint.  Apparently, while most regular WordPress plugins work with the individual blogs in the network, there aren't many effective tools for aggregating information on the site.  For example, with the GPrep blog network, we wanted the main blog to act as an aggregator for all of the content on each of the individual teacher blogs, rather than as a blog itself.  We found this really difficult to do, mostly for a lack of plugins.  While WordPress Mu probably works great for someone who has many blogs or for groups of individual bloggers, it doesn't work all that well for "networks" of blogs, where all the content is aggregated under one main umbrella.  Our developer noted that WordPress Mu seems a bit incomplete and that for our purposes, Drupal would have been a better choice.

I don't dobut that WordPress Mu is a powerful tool for managing many individual blogs from one place or grouping blogs together through one site.  However, for developing a network of blogs that share content, WordPress Mu gets a bit tricky and is need of some additional features.

As we noted a few weeks ago, CNN launched a new beta site to test its features for its forthcoming relaunch scheduled for next week on July 1st.  The beta site is now off-line.  Senior Vice President and Senior Executive Producer Mitch Gelman explains on the beta site's blog that:

We've absorbed and dissected that feedback so we can evolve and craft a CNN.com that works for you.

So, to respond your suggestions, we took the Beta offline on Tuesday, June 26. We’re making some changes based on the thoughts you sent us…

Personally I find this strategy rather interesting.  Why not make one tweak at a time and make sure that the adjustments are what people wanted before officially lauching?

We'll just have to see how people react to the tweaks CNN is making based upon its feedback from its beta period. 

The design of John Edwards’ MySpace page is pretty broken right now. As you’ll see below, page elements are getting pushed to the left and it is generally not looking as intended.

If a campaign website was messed up this bad we’d undoubtedly write something snarky. But, having done battle with MySpace ourselves, we can only feel sympathy for the folks at the Edwards’ campaign. They are fighting a losing battle. (more…)

This morning, Steve pointed to me to the new beta version of the CNN.com website, which is now available for public testing. You can view it here and take a guided tour of the new site here. Following are a few things that jumped out at me: (more…)

Usabilty celebrity Jakob Nielsen has been the go-to authority on everything web-related for some time now. I have seen him in Boston, San Francisco and Amsterdam (I think). I have purchased, and been reimbursed for, several of his books. He’s a funny guy and a lot of laughs at seminars and yet I believe I am done with our friend. I think his principles have all been disbursed. I think, no matter what the future holds for us as web developers, he has said all there is to say on usability. I also can’t take his site anymore.

When I burst onto the web scene many years ago (I made myself laugh right there), Mr. Nielsen was a real help, and I appreciated his simplistic website and even understood his obvious dislike of designers. Websites in ’97 were full of (let’s face it) obvious mistakes, and having a guru to quote helped justify your design choices when dealing with clients. (more…)

I’ve always been an admirer of the concept and execution of the social news site Newsvine. I wrote about it glowingly when it first came out. Conceptually it always seemed like a good compromise between the chaos of sites like Digg and the top down nature of traditional newspaper websites.

With their redesign, they’ve pushed things in a pretty dramatic new direction. Essentially, the site is now a cross between the old Newsvine and an Ajax startup page like Netvibes. The site is beautiful and works wonderfully from a technical perspective.

But despite my admiration for Newsvine, you vote with your feet. And I’ve never really spent much time on the site because I’ve never found the content that compelling. I think there are a couple of reasons why: (more…)

Update 2: They have tweaked the design and it is now less busy and has one big lead graphic. Although they are changing it every few minutes I think.


Update: The McCain campaign has launched their official campaign blog as well.

Original Post

Looks like the McCain team revamped their website in recent days. I think it is better from a usability standpoint.

They abandoned the black and white scheme (which was just a little too foreboding) in favor of some color. They got rid of the little video rollover effects that would surprise and annoy visitors. They are giving people the option to read some text instead of going with a “watch video or go away” approach.

However, it is a little too cluttered for my taste. I’m a fan of sites with one overriding message/graphic as the lead piece everyday (Edwards, Clinton, Obama). Also, McCain’s picture is strangely absent from the top half of the site. We’ve gone from having too many pictures of the candidate to having none at all “above the fold.” I’m sure they’ll work some McCain pictures into the flexible space on the left at some point.

What do you think?