Day 1 recap
The first full day of the redesigned NewsOK.com is closing. We’ve now been on the site for a full 24 hours.
We’ll be evaluating and dissecting the feedback from our users over the next few days, but early indications of the first day is very positive.
With any major change to a product, whether its The Oklahoman or NewsOK.com, we never expect to get a lot of calls, e-mails and comments from people telling us how great we are. It generally doesn’t happen. People are wired to let us know when they’re unhappy and stay quiet when they’re pleased.
But today, that trend doesn’t seem to be true. We’ve received many positive comments, many helpful insights, some negative comments and a few ugly comments.
We cherish the positive, act on the insightful, discuss the negative and move past the ugly. Regardless of the nature of the calls and comments, thank you for using NewsOK.com.
There is still much to work for us to do to completely move over NewsOK into our new design, but the vast majority of the site is operational. We have plans to add greater functionality and more enhanced features. You’ll see more blog posts when we get some of the aspects from deep into our site online and ready.
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Comments
I (previously) came to the site for Oklahoma news….it is News*OK*, after all. Previous site was easier to see the Oklahoma news and had a better balance to(ward) the Oklahoma related news (and not canned AP stories about Oklahoma). Too bad comments aren’t available on most of the stories. Can still come for the sports content…..even with the overwhelming OU bias.
Why break things that worked and still don’t fix things that have never worked?
1) Before the redesign, you could get to any story from any of the tabs thru the drop down lists. What was a simple, 1-step process has become a multi-step process.
2) There are fewer stories now than before. They used to stay listed until at least the next printed edition of the paper hit the streets, now they may be up for minutes or if you are lucky, a few hours.
3) Videos no longer work. You click on the video, a transparent gray box comes up and the status message says “done” (no error messages, no video). Do find it interesting that on the separate site that holds the redesign presentation, videos work there just like they used to work on the main site.
4) While the font used has been made a little larger, why take away the functionality of the user being able to increase/decrease the font size?
5) The search feature never has worked and still doesn’t. Even if you have today’s paper, and you type in the exact headline of an article, you get back “no matches were found…”
6) While the redesign does have a cleaner look to it, why does it not match the printed paper (THAT redesign cluttered everything up, adding all sorts of color etc). Since NewsOK.com IS the online version of the paper, it would seem logical to have the same, consistent overall corporate “identity” or look and feel if you will (within the constraints of the respective mediums).
7) Other than that…great job!
I like the new site a lot! Great job!