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Scripps adds 2 more Ellington sites
I neglected to report Scripps' relaunch of GoSanAngelo.com, Web site of the San Angelo Standard-Times in Texas, which as of a few weeks ago became newly enriched with Ellington content management goodness on the Django development framework.
Just today, we launched another one: IndependentMail.com, Web site of the Anderson Independent-Mail in South Carolina.
That brings to five the number of newspaper.com sites we've brought onto Ellington from Scripps Newspapers Interactive Group. Add a few more to the Scripps mix from our paper in Naples, Fla., which served as the pilot for Ellington before we started the corporate rollout. All told, including suburban/satellite papers and niche products, I count 11 domains Scripps is operating under Ellington.
So far, so good! Congratulations to the site teams and my corporate colleagues.
Update 4:20 p.m. ET 12/6/06: Will Sullivan reacts at Journerdism: "The Scripps corporate cookie cutter template is getting old. Bulleted lists are good for occasional peppering throughout the site, not for 98 percent of the site’s content structure."
In response, here's a reminder of what I've said before: We are rolling out sites using a template stack and visual presentation that contain patterns and practices we believe work well. This stack is our site teams' starter kit, from which they will be able to evolve their own presentation styles going forward. If we tried to do completely custom design work for every site in the rollout, we'd be three years or more getting it done.
Better to get the efficiencies and new functionality in the hands of our site teams quickly, and with a serviceable, well tested and proven design. Nothing's perfect and nothing lasts forever, so I for one am curious to see how site teams will morph their designs in the months and years to come.
Meanwhile, it's rare that people in the target user base for any one of our sites will have occasion to visit any other in the group. So the design patterns might be tiresome to people who are following our whole rollout project, but will appear new to each newspaper.com's users as that site rolls out.
Both blogs
Jay - I love the database, and I'm sure the online staff of the papers love the CMS, but the design of the new front pages on all these papers leaves me disengaged. I'd rather see some larger, bolder, louder heds jumping off the page. As it is now, I get the impression that nothing on the site is new(s).
The article pages, on the other hand, are awesome.
Ryan,
Part of that depends on when you're stopping by to look at any of these sites. All of them have "flags" on home page headline blocks to denote new or recently updated content. The styles of these flags are a bit different for each site, but you'd see more of them at any given site midday, between print editions.
We believe that the Flash poster rotator serves to announce the biggest items on the site at any given time in a loud enough voice. It's hard to miss. I might like to see a bit more hierarchy of text sizes for the other headline links, to follow your suggestion, but these designs test out well.
If I see a major weakness in the design, it's on section indexes below the home page, where small Web teams often pay little attention to visual order and packaging. Some of these indexes tend to run on "autopilot" and become just headline lists. On the plus side, simple headline lists are probably at least as well suited for search engine indexing as heavily packaged indexes.
Not Scripps, but another Ellington site launched Friday:
http://pegasusnews.com
Once again, fine looking sites. Overall, I like them every time. I vote for cutting the page length in half, but I like them very much, or more.
I'm still waiting for Ventura :-)
Mike, nice looking site.
Thanks for addressing my concerns, Jay. Don't get me wrong, it's a great base template (easily better than 90 percent of the news sites out there). I just haven't seen many Scripps sites break the mold and experiment with more visual ways to bring people into stories, which I've found can very easily and exponentially drive traffic (compared to short teases with words). Hopefully, as the dust settles from the redesigns and changing to Ellington, they'll begin to experiment and really knock it out of the park. Creativity and competition makes us all better.
Will: Agreed. It's a Clapton thing: "It's in the way that you use it."
Howard: Thanks. And Ventura's on the schedule for very early 2007. Stay tuned.
Mike: Congratulations. I know you've been working toward this a long time.
[...] Jay Small addresses my concerns about corporate templates on his blog. I added this comment: “Thanks for addressing my concerns, Jay. Don’t get me wrong, [...]