The Daily’s public editor, David Spett, wrote a column today tearing apart the The Daily Northwestern’s Web site, and rightly so.
As part of the team that redesigned The Daily’s site this spring, I have to acknowledge that it needs to be redone again. The current mess is dysfunctional, hard to use and ugly, and a long way from our original design (below).
Besides all factors David Spett mentions in his piece, the Web site has also just atrophied. As far as I can remember, the new design was working pretty nicely last spring. Over the summer, though, it began collapsing – articles weren’t going ino the right slots and parts of it weren’t being updated. And now it’s just a disaster.
Which points to the underlying problem: The Daily has been unwilling to commit time, enery and people to its online section, and just treats it like an afterthought. It’s basically just Online Editor Ryan Reeh, who works hard on the site (and is also a friend), and everyone else on staff is focused on the paper.