News.Com Redesign November 12, 1998 CNET has brought out the redesign for News.Com which has been previewed on several other CNET sites that have already changed over. The stripe down the left has dissapeared, but the yellow is still prominent in the masthead and with some site navigation. Jai Singh in his note to readers mentioned this new "scalable" design that has no fixed width tables so text will wrap, adjusted to the size of the browser window. (I'm amused at resizing a tiny strip of browser space and watching the text wrap in peculiar ways.) Front door The front page also makes use of the "scalable" design along with a new grid of the latest articles in each category. Speaking of categories, I'll be taking bets on when the e-commerce category gets sponsored off to IBM and their e-business unit (a la Webmonkey and e-business). A cynical person would say the new categories were renamed just because they sound cooler. The Big Picture I find that the related stories at the bottom of articles to be fairly accurate to scroll back through different angles. But if there's some real digging into old articles, there might be something useful here. The new story layout also reminds me of MSNBC's initial passage of text then some links and back to the main body of the article. I can't believe they are still using those category headers in red with that serif font. Doesn't fit in. Looks a bit pale in comparison to everything around it. A left over brought forward for sentimental reasons I guess. Short takes and news from around the web are still to be found after the redesign. And there's a section, gag, called My News.Com. Vertical or Horizontal With the previous design the layout was constrained on the horizontal with fixed tables and margins designed to work at 640x480. And you noticed this with a tiny thin column down the middle, but there was only a single advertising banner up top until you reached content. Now with a lot of that navigation that used to be in the left margin moved up top, it feels odd not to be able to skim a few sentences before having to scroll down. Yogi Berra Jai starts off quoting Yogi Berra with: "You can observe a lot just by watching." Yogi also said: "It's deja vu all over again."