The home page of the San Antonio Express-News looks different today:
Here’s the old version:
Eric Braun at mySA blogged about the tweaks. The main difference is the removal of the centerpiece where readers were supposed to click on tabs to pull up a new photo and links to stories and resources. In reality, few people were clicking on those tabs — which meant the Express-News was missing out on page views.
The new version is similar to the way other Hearst-owned newspapers, such as the Houston Chronicle, have designed their sites. To my eye, the new home page offers a cleaner look with more photos to draw people in.
Related: How to research a property’s history using Bexar County’s free records search
That’s not to say mySA is perfect. Creating a compelling Web site is something many newspapers — including mine — have grappled with. Charlotte-Anne Lucas recently waxed nostalgic about mySA’s innovations but the site has also suffered from many problems for many years, and to me it feels like we’re moving at a glacial pace to fix them.
The good news is, the folks at mySA are working very hard to make the Web site better — as this recent design change demonstrates.
And hey, at least the site doesn’t look like this anymore.
Minor nit to pick – I wrote that piece in 2009, so it wasn’t recent ;-)
As a news consumer and web-only journalist since last century, I’m always glad to see a news organization invest in improving the online user experience by doing things like redesigning the home page.
The point of my article was not nostalgia. When the mothership subsumed MySA, it discarded many of the innovative things we’d done and the lessons we learned.
I should amend my article to point out that the Express-News online operation learned that paywalls didn’t work back in 1997, something they seem to have forgotten all over again.
My last line summed it up:
“Those who don’t pause to learn from the successes we had as we failed forward, face a longer journey.”
Hi Charlotte-Anne. I think we’re caught in a time warp. This post was published in 2009, too.