Strib celebrates day one of new design with site crash

By Steve Perry Wed., Oct. 12 2005 at 8:55 AM

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At this writing, shortly before 9 a.m., the Star Tribune's redesigned website--AKA, death by a thousand focus groups--has been unreachable for the better part of the past hour. You don't suppose it caught a glimpse of itself in a mirror and committed suicide, do you?

Or it could be that the new Strib is drawing so much traffic from curiosity seekers that the server is swamped. That, um, may not be a problem going forward.

If you've got any reaction to the new Strib, online or print, feel free to treat the Comments section as an open thread for your thoughts.

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I notice they've elbowed the "website redesign feedback poll," clicking there returns 404 Not Found. Ugly.
Ack! Too much going on at the new site for my mind to process. I really liked the old style, where it was pretty clear what you were supposed to look at -- the long list of headlines down the middle of the page. And if you wanted something more, you used the navigation buttons at the top to find it. But this new design is just too jumbled to make sense of things.
It's always nice to see someone take a nicely organized site and replace it with a big mess. Job security for the web folk, as their will be plenty of changes afoot. If you think about it, it could be marketing genuis. A nice new site would have brought shrugs and "what's the big deal", a hideous monster like this will get all sorts of criticism. We've all heard there's no such thing as bad publicity.
Here's the redesign "blog". They don't mention the crash, but seem to be commenting on the process-- both print and web, mostly mentioning features not tech hurdles. <a href="http://nc.startribune.com/blogs/redesign/" rel="nofollow">http://nc.startribune.com/blogs/redesign/</a> Some focus groupie stuff in there, too: "I like this new Star Tribune; I find it visually exciting." ? Apply Valley working mother, late 40s.
Oh god, it's worse than I thought.
It's back up now. I'd given up trying to refresh the page, but I read as much in a Rex post at Mnspeak.
I've been involved with big web launches, and I've worked in publishing, so this all makes me laugh. 1. Publishing people assume that re-launching a web site is like starting to print a new design. It's not. 2. Sloppy brand management thinks "must launch print and web same day!!!" This is, as stated, sloppy. Brand management and brand launch can be done over time, and can be more effective done that way. 3. Massive public relations. Always a bad idea with web launches, because it pins you to a date, doesn't let you launch it from one server, then another and do some load-balancing, etc. etc. I wouldn't say PR is bad because of traffic -- a news site is always going to have endured more traffic during a major news event, and traffic alone won't crash them for something like this. Crappy, cookie-laden code with a lot of sloppy Java or Flash, THAT will crash a site even with limited traffic.
I caught a glimpse of the site this morning, around 7 am. Surprise! It was hideous. Fully half the page was ads. No images loaded (other than ads), layout appeared totally scattershot. We'll see what it looks like when it's back up. But we're shooting dead fish in a dry barrel here. I'm just embarassed for this newspaper.