Design review of the new NHRegister.com

If you could see a heat map for the New Haven Register’s recently re-designed site, the browser’s ‘back’ button would probably be white-hot. It is never a good sign, for one thing, when a visitor lands on a newspaper’s homepage and it takes a few moments to distinguish the masthead, which in this case is nearly squeezed off the page by flanking ads (a style the New York Times pulls off but the Register does not) and larger top-and-bottom banner ads.

Although the site follows the now-standard modular layout, the various modules are not well separated, and prime placement from the top down is generally given to ads rather than stories. Interactive features like “SeeClickFix” are buried below the fold, and the designers seem to have taken the fashion for white space a bit too far, giving the Register the dubious distinction of having a site that manages to appear both crowded and barren at the same time.

What the site lacks in design it does not, unfortunately, make up for in content. Many of the articles are culled from the AP wire, and even most of the multimedia is not unique to the site. The JRC seems to be staking their online future on the “e-paper” version ($12 per month with a 14-day trial), which promises readers an exact replica of the print edition – “same ads, same classifieds, same sections.” Now there’s vision.

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