InfoWorld: Redesign 404 June 20, 1999 On June 18, 1999, InfoWorld unveiled their redesigned site that drew an expected flow of reaction. The next day I stumbled onto some of the hidden secrets of the InfoWorld redesign. The following is adapted from two posts I made to Scripting News' discussion board on June 19, 1999: Amazing! Putting aside all the comments about the new layout and design at Infoworld, I can't believe that they decided to break all the inbound links to their stories.

archive.infoworld.com It seems that along with their redesign, InfoWorld.Com couldn't spend the time to move their old content into their new site. So instead of following links to stories at InfoWorld, we get links to 404 error messages. To discover the location of the old content, you have to find the archives and figure out that their old content is replicated at archive.infoworld.com (of course, they make no mention of this in their unhelpful 404 message). Thousands and thousands of broken links InfoWorld is a popular publication and I'm sure that other sites have made thousands of links to the InfoWorld site. How many people will find what they are looking for at archive.infoworld.com? How many of them will just hit the back button in frustration? Ruining their search engine The moving of InfoWorld's archives has also caused their own search engine to be ruined by not indexing any articles prior to June 18, 1999. So if you do a search at InfoWorld for an old article that mentions Jakob Nielsen you'll get 0 hits. But if you do the exact same search at archive.infoworld.com you get 9 hits. And in the case of the search engine, you don't get a 404 or any other type of message in the search results that would even suggest that the articles are indexed in another search engine. Essentially, they've engineered a redesign that not only breaks thousands of inbound links but they've even ruined their search engine by hiding all the articles in their archive. Here's the Q&A with Jakob Nielsen I was looking for at InfoWorld: "Almost all initial Web sites are bad, and I'd say about 90 percent of the Web sites out there are bad in terms of the user experience. They are not delivering what people want, making it difficult to do the things people want, and so people are turning away in disgust. User experience is going to be the most important factor that determines a company's success in the Internet age." InfoWorld's Response at discuss.userland.com Posted on Sunday May 20, 1999 by Sandy Reed, Editor in Chief at InfoWorld: "Before InfoWorld's reputation is totally ruined, I want to make it clear that we're working on the problems with the links from our new site to the archives and other content on the old site. We didn't do it intentionally -- that would be truly clueless -- but we did make the decision to launch the new site without solving the problem. The missing links are the #1 complaint and fixing them is our highest priority." InfoWorld: Link to us, but only if you ask first I came across InfoWorld's permissions policy for copyrighted material at InfoWorld. Of course it has an amusing section on linking to Infoworld: May I link to an article on InfoWorld Electric? To link to an article on InfoWorld Electric, send an e-mail request to Nancy Grant at nancy_grant@infoworld.com with the URL of the InfoWorld content you want to link to. If your request is approved, we will ask you to confirm back to us the exact URL of the place on your site where we can find the link. How long does a link last? Web time can be fleeting. As a result, not all links to our site will endure the test of time. Some of our URLs are static and others are dynamically generated. This may have an effect on the lifespan of a link. It is up to you to make sure the link is still "live". Update on July 4, 1999: Links pointing to old InfoWorld stories are working once again. While the search engine to all the archived stories seems to still be disconnected from the new Infoworld site's search engine.

Related links [1] Fighting Linkrot; Useit.Com [2] New Web site brings new information to readers; InfoWorld, Sandy Reed, InfoWorld editor in Chief. [3] Jakob Nielsen plans to improve usability of the Web; InfoWorld