Jim Romenesko’s widely read media-industry blog — once known as Media Gossip and now, under the aegis of the Poynter Institute, published under the more staid Media News flag — hs just undergone a redesign, and the readers are howling. Where are the left-hand column links we loved? Why did they mess with a good thing? Why can’t I change the font size? The “feedback” feature doesn’t work right! And so on, and so on.
As a veteran of a half-dozen redesign projects, I think I can guess what was happening behind the scenes at Poynter: The project is rolling down the road, there’s a deadline that has been pushed back once or twice or three times and just can’t be pushed back any more, a lot of what the designers wanted to do is working and a lot still isn’t, the developers are working as hard as they can, and as the deadline approaches triage kicks in: You put up what’s working and you start prioritizing fixes.
As far as I could tell, the Media News redesign went live some time Friday morning and then went offline for most of the rest of that day — during which time my browser showed the old Thursday edition of the page, in the old design. Which suggests that this redesign launch, like most, hit a few bumps in the road.
What most people — even the savvy journalists who congregate at Romenesko’s site — don’t seem to get is that Website redesigns are nearly always slow-motion train wrecks. No matter how smart and experienced the people behind the redesign are, no matter how much testing you do, once you go live you encounter a million and one little problems. You spend the next several weeks fixing them. By the time you’re done, most of your readers have grown accustomed to the graphical and functional changes that first irked them. Many of them start to discover, and appreciate, the actual improvements that the redesign incorporated. The world moves on.
Meanwhile, much of the value in the redesign is often invisible to the public but of great import to the publishing organization — usually (if the managers have done their homework) there’s a more solid infrastructure in place, a good database is storing the content, and more flexible and speedier publishing tools are in the hands of the writers and editors who need them.
I’m not saying that the Poynter redesign is a big improvement, or that some of the complaints aren’t justified. I liked the “old” Romenesko too, probably because I was used to it. But mostly, I’m feeling empathy for the folks at Poynter.org, who I bet need some sleep right around now.