Out of mere interest, as I really doubt I will become a subscriber, I signed up for the new Times website trial. Remember, this is the site that people will be forced to pay for in a month or so.
The instantaneous reaction to the new site is that it is a substantial retrograde step, although there is a clear attempt to bring the online branding and "look n feel" closer together. Using serif fonts for the page text as well as the titles flies in the face of received web wisdom. The wrapping and the line spacing is also unhelpful for readability.
Furthermore, the colours are far less attractive and monochrome which will make usability poor.
The navigation is changed too. The structure is radically different and presumably replicates the paper version. Breadcrumbs have been removed which makes locating your position in the site harder.
Pages on the current free website accommodate the full length of an article - the new site makes users click through to subsequent pages just to finish reading the same article.
All-in-all it will be fascinating to discover how the Times justifies all of these changes. They make the website far harder to use, particularly for someone who isn't intimately familiar with the paper version - ie the vast majority!
#fail
What is amazing is that the content is substantially different on the homepage and that the text sub-headings are being re-edited and different images are being used. The sheer workload increase that this entails is extraordinary if replicated across the entire site.
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