Tag Archives: Arige Shrouf

During my first semester at Emerson, I was required to read The New York Times on a daily basis. After weeks of waiting in vain for home delivery, I began relying on the online publication. With it, I could get the same content and not worry about ink covered fingers. I no longer look for a printed version of the paper since the website is easily accessible. But has it always been user friendly?

The New York Times had its first web presence on November 12, 1996. The site allowed visitors to take a guided tour of how the content was managed after free registration. Twenty years later, the website’s purpose—to make the news more readily available—does not seem to have changed, but the site’s overall appearance has.

In the original design, the few examples of graphics and multimedia were much smaller and simpler than those found today, and the color scheme was basic red and black. Many of the pages functioned mainly as a table of contents, with little more than a title provided to link to the article. On the main page, the original design included the logo and the phrase “On the Web.” The search button was also buried within a clunky links bar at the bottom of the page. When I looked at the original site from my phone, I had to zoom in because it was essentially a miniature version of the web view that was difficult to read from a mobile device.

With its modern incarnation, The New York Times has created an online viewing experience that rivals their print version. The headlines and the short blurbs about each article are easily visible once you log in. The site even provides the option of viewing the print version of the paper in an online format they pitch as “The daily newspaper, reimagined for the web.”
The presence of widgets and multimedia components is impressive as well. Articles include relevant photos and videos with readily available links to share them across platforms. There are several menu bars and link bars that can be accessed from different places on a page, which is useful since pages can be long. Despite the large amount of content on each page, the site and its components load quickly and are accessible on mobile devices. Even comments are incorporated seamlessly into the posts; viewers can choose to ignore them where they linger on the right side of the page or they can click on them and have them pop out on a separate screen. I may not comment, but I like that I can read other people’s comments so easily.

I’m not the kind of person who enjoys reading the news on a regular basis, so I like that this publication includes the leads from each article in the main pages. It allows me to be choosy about what I read and to skip ahead to what I actually want to read about: books. In terms of design and accessibility, The New York Times has managed to upgrade to a good website. Now if only they would recreate the sticky links bar for the mobile version so I no longer have to scroll endlessly on my phone, I would say they have a winner on their hands!