Please read Part 1 before coming here.

After all the thought that went into the redesign of the print version, the management seemed to have let the internet boys do whatever they wanted. The result is something like what your home will look like after you have permitted your teenage sons to host a party.

To begin with, there are three online sites, as mentioned in Part 1. One site is called Straits Times Breaking News, another called Straits Times Digital, and a third, called Straits Times e-paper.

(I have not had the time to review the e-paper.)

I will group my comments into three areas: look/layout, organisation/navigation and the innumerable signs that the sites were launched prematurely. All these types of shortcomings reveal a poor management grasp of the revamping process.

Breaking News site Click this for Image A: ST Digital site Click this for Image B:

But more generally, I am not convinced of the wisdom of putting Breaking News on a site separate from the morning news. This possible source of confusion is further compounded by having the URL www.straitstimes.com link to the Breaking News rather than to the site that mirrors all the articles in the print version. Surely, that is not intuitive.

 
Look and layout

Overall, the website's homepages are a mess. Whereas the print version went for a cleaner look, the web versions still have beige and blue backgrounds.

If you click on the thumbnail at right, you will get what I saw of the Breaking News site (Image A) when I went there around 11 a.m. on 8 August 2008 (the first day).

If you click on the second thumbnail, you will get the ST Digital site of around the same time.

Overall, they still look like refrigerators with too many magnets and Post-It stickers on them.

What flaws struck me? The boxes and text were not always aligned. Marker 12 on the Breaking News site (Image A) and markers 21 and 22 on the ST Digital site (Image B) are examples of this.

Furthermore, while at first glance, the two sites look as if they share the same "skin" (tech-speak or layout structure), in fact they aren't the same. The beige one has four boxes abreast. The blue one has three boxes abreast. A closer look will reveal even more inconsistencies that have not been resolved and you can only conclude that there has been shockingly insufficient attention to detail.

Look at images C and D, comparing markers 50 and 51 (inconsistent margins), 52 and 53 (space), 54 and 55 (thickness of line)... and so on.

Images C and D:

 
From either site, clicking through to ST Forum yielded a layout that had text stretching right across the entire width of the screen. This made it difficult to read. Does nobody in Straits Times know this?

Image E:

You will also have noticed that there are supposed to be images (marker 31) that somehow didn't load.

 
Organisation and navigation

One source of confusion lies in the way the sections are variously named. The section names in the online editions are different from each other and from the print edition. See this comparison chart.

Chart F:

Firstly, I cannot understand why the site called Breaking News has a section within that is called "Latest Stories". Isn't the whole Breaking News site supposed to contain the latest news?

Secondly, the section called "Prime" in print is called "Top stories" online. Why the difference? 

Thirdly, the grouping called "Review & Forum" in print is reflected as separate Review, Insight and ST Forum sections in Straits Times Digital.

Breaking News, for its part, has additional sections "Tech and Science", "Courts and Crime" and "Blogs" that do not appear in the other versions. Why "Blogs" should be part of breaking news, I don't understand. Are blogs things that one whips off on the run, becoming obsolete within 24 hours?

What is called "Home" in the print newspaper, is called "Singapore" online. In this case, I can guess what the reason is: Online users may not be from Singapore, so calling it "Home" may seem odd to them, but they could easily have reconciled the two by calling it "Home.Singapore" in both print and online, applying the same hierarchical way of naming as in the other sections of the print edition.

Then there's carelessness. What is "Sport" in the print version and Breaking News is "Sports" in Straits Times Digital.

You'll see evidence of all these in the Images A and B. Look at the section headings; they can be found in the navigation bars near the top of each page.

It gets worse.

From the homepage of the Breaking News site (Image A), I saw a box titled "World" containing 14 news items. At the bottom of the box there were the words "Show More" which could be clicked (marker 15 on Image A). So I clicked it. It took me to a page titled "World" .... which didn't show me more items, but less. Only six, to be exact, and not even the latest six.

Image G:

Notice also, faulty alignment of the fifth news item (marker 41).

The above issues suggest a considerable lack of thought regarding the design and operation of the sites. For a revamp which was supposed to take the Straits Times forward into the digital age, this seems a rather strange neglect.

Perhaps the organisation was overly focussed on getting its video news, called RazorTV, fully integrated. In a sense, it has, putting the window for it right smack in the centre of the Breaking News page, but even so, it begs the question whether that is the right location. Furthermore, the videos seem to launch automatically once you land onto the Breaking News site. Is that the best solution? Does it slow down the loading of the rest of the site?

 
Not ready

The other problems I noticed had less to do with design than with execution. Many parts of the sites were not ready when they were launched. When I looked at the site around 11 am, two sections of the Breaking News site were missing titles (Image A, markers 13 and 14), while its "Top Stories" box was empty (marker 11).

(When I checked back after lunch, there were top stories in the box, but that to me only indicated that the newsroom was rushing to put in its first top story that very morning. Which in turn means the site had not been running parallel for a few days prior to launch, which doesn't sound like the right way to do things.)

The "Archive" boxes at the bottom of both the Breaking News and Straits Times Digital sites were blank, nor was the word "Archive" itself clickable (Image A marker 16; Image B, marker 23).

Then, differences in presentation depending on the browser one used were not fully resolved. Markers 61, 62 and 63 below indicate problems with the Rednano search not appearing in Firefox, a strange white border around the log-in area, and poor alignment of the advertisement banner with the log-in area (notching) in IE7.

Image H:

I don't want to go on even though I noticed many more similar flaws. The above examples are enough to pose questions about how well managed the redesign was, whether the launch was rushed, but most important of all, whether the whole thing had been properly conceptualised.

© Yawning Bread