Northwestern News Network just revamped its Web site. Before, when you clicked on a video, a new window popped up. Now, integrated into the page is a video player (highlighted in orange):
The pop-ups have become pups.
It’s delightfully easy to check out videos now. The story about pitbull regulations was nicely shot, although all of the cute doggies kind of biased me.
Overall, the site is cleaner than its predecessor (here’s an archived version). One complaint I do have is that all of the little story boxes look the same, which makes it harder to navigate.
Still, it’s a nice step forward. Designer Andrew Bloustein, ‘06, writes that it took 3 months to research and develop the new site. The goal was to integrate “picture, story and video” to make the greatest impact on readers.
I e-mailed Andrew Bloustein about the redesign. He talked about keeping all of a story’s content together and visible:
I loved the integrated video player on abc7chicago.com, but I did not like how they did their top stories… I felt that stories should not be “hidden” at all, especially top ones.
So just basically that kind of research… seeing the best way to organize things. And in that vein, I felt the best way to present a story was with the text, picture, and video right there in one place. As far as sites that really inspired me, you’ll probably see a lot of cbs2chicago.com in the NNN site.
Bloustein also said that the site has evolved along with the TV network itself, from being a place where parents could watch their kids’ work to being an actual news site.