The New New York Times Home Page

For a long time now, I have been annoyed by the design of the NYT home page which, in technical terms, sucked REALLY badly. (See the masthead of today’s edition, above.) Now, finally, The Times has announced a new and improved version of their home page.

If you go to the NYT website RIGHT NOW, you will still have a chance to see the older version of their home page, which will soon be gone. That’s an important part of this exercise because without the old version in front of you, none of these comments will make sense.

Let’s do a quick analysis of what’s wrong with the old home page.

1. On my standard-size laptop computer, the menu bar extends far beyond the width of the rest of the page. Amateurish at best.
2. The headline of the lead article in column one is misaligned so that the first word in the headline is obliterated by the menu bar. This is not an anomaly. This happened regularly.
3. There are at least five different typefaces on the home page. This is a matter of taste but it seems to distract me from the content of the articles.
4. There are HUGE holes in the format where there is no content in one or even two or three columns for the equivalent of several column inches where there should be copy. (This is something that would NEVER happen in the print edition of…