What does the new cnn.com mean for blog design?

Usability and design testing can make a huge impact on any web site.  But, if you run a blog or a small web site, the costs of wide scale usability and design testing is expensive.  One of the best affordable ways to improve design is to learn from those organizations that have invested in large scale testing.  Sites like Amazon, eBay and CNN are often imitated for that very reason.

With CNN making a major update to their home page, it is well worth a look at this new design.  CNN has posted a video overview of the new site.  The changes include a focus on images at the top of the page, the classic above the fold section, which you already see in many blogging themes. The site clearly takes advantage of the increase in screen sizes available to most home users with a substantial amount of information displayed on the home page. The top menu bar includes links to a substantial number of items – going full width across the screen.

One of my favorite feature is this link heavy list of stories.  From a search perspective it dramatically increases the number of stories that benefit from the search juice of being on the home page of CNN.  It allows for the highlighting of more than just the latest story or blog and really allows for more user choice in choosing stories to read.

Clearly – this is an area where you can never please everybody.  I’ve seen comments like “First though I think the content is easier see at a glance, and there seems to be more of it on their home page.  That is always a good thing” and the expressive “Gah, my eyes. Too much going on there.”

Another new feature is the Newspulse.  This is a beta feature that allows you to see the  hottest content from the CNN site.  This will be constantly updated in real time to reflect the latest trends. The easy to understand “red bars” highlight the popularity of the stories – the longer the bar, the more popular the story.  With a click on “Share” you can share this item with Mixx, Twitter, Facebook, Digg and more.  On the full Newspulse page you can also select which topics interest you and whether you want to see stories or videos.  As a converted newspaper reader, I actually prefer to read my stories and appreciate this choice.
You can find many WordPress themes that copy from the “big” sites – themes like this old CNN inspired theme, this Amazon inspired theme and this Google inspired WordPress theme. It’s hard to copyright look a feel so these inspired themes are legl, though if you setup a site that directly competes with one of these sites – I am certain that the lawyers would get involved. Likewise, I am sure that we’ll soon see new themes that copy some of the best ideas from this new CNN theme.

What do you think of the new CNN theme?  Will you be looking to incorporate any of these ideas into your blog?

Written by David Silversmith from Info Musing
Posted on October 27th, 2009 and filed under Blogging
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