Wired News has redesigned its site and gone back to at least some aspects of the old-school Hotwired color-scheme and look. Pulling off any kind of redesign in the post-dotcom-boom Web doldrums is a coup. Douglas Bowman of Hotwired and Terra Lycos has posted some interesting comments on the reaction to the redesign here (link courtesy Dave Winer):
| What’s interesting about the negative feedback is that, aside from the aesthetic — which is always subjective — none of the feedback is consistent. One user wants one thing, another user wants it the exact opposite. |
Here at Salon we recall our last major redesign in summer of 2000, when a combination of technical snafus on launch and a couple of bad choices that we reversed within a week or so led to a massive reader outcry. Those problems obscured the deeper reality that we’d pulled off 95 percent of an extraordinarily complex project, and that we’d put in place a design that still serves Salon well two and a half years later. Someday, of course, we will revamp our site again. And when we do, I expect many of the same readers who told us back in 2000 that we’d destroyed their dearly beloved Salon to write in again and defend the current design — the very same one that they so detested in 2000 — from our awful innovations. It’s okay! It’s just the nature of user response. The most important thing is that the readers actually care; they feel a sense of ownership of a site that they visit regularly. Wired News should take considerable consolation from that.
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