First Impressions

The first thing that I noticed was the nice, clean, red header that is far superior to the boring, mostly white header of the past. I like that the CNN logo is centered and not crowded.

If you are familiar with the site, you will immediately notice the layout change on the homepage. A video box is now front and center containing the main story while other top stories and the latest news has moved to the left column. The right column seems dominated by a 300×250 ad block.

The nice color palette is very similar to before but the dominance of the solid red (#CA0002) header gives it a renewed feeling.

Emphasis on Video

It only makes sense that CNN should prominently display video content and this is what they have done with the redesign. In addition to the video player on the homepage, video is also the first link in the navigation behind “Home” and it is promoted with a darker shade of red to stand out.

In the past my major complaint with the CNN site has been constant issues while attempting to watch video. The jury is still out on this one as I am having buffering troubles but these may be caused by spotty Wi-Fi at the moment.

New Does Not Have to Mean ‘Valid’

In case you were curious, CNN.com is HTML 4.01 Transitional and does not validate with 60 errors. No doubt it is not a small chore to cut down the validation errors on a site of this magnitude but far too many of these appear to be just lazy, like missing alt tags. Not surprisingly, the CSS does not validate either with 49 errors.

Under the Hood

Granted, the target demographic of CNN.com probably have good Internet connections but this is one fat homepage. The site weighed in at 1.11 MB for me and that is without any of the video loading. By contrast, ESPN.com is roughly half the load size at 663 KB. Here is the breakdown of the CNN homepage:

• HTML: 42 KB
• Images: 359 KB
• CSS: 143 KB
• JavaScript: 523 KB
• Flash: 75 KB

Speaking of the 523 KB of Javascript, interestingly enough, they make use of Protoaculous (147 KB) which is a minified combination of Prototype and Scriptaculous.

Gridalicious

If you like grid-based design, you can definitely get your share on the new site. Although the top half of most pages does not scream “GRID!”… most main pages are full of grid-love on the lower half.

In addition to the grids, I did come across a bit of “pleasing tension” (a concept I recently heard of from Elliot Jay Stocks) which challenges the user by breaking the structure of the grid, hopefully making a more interesting experience in the process.

NewsPulse (Beta)

The biggest new feature appears to be the NewsPulse which is a summary of the most popular news stories of the selected time period (24 hours by default). The cool thing about this feature is being able to drill down to only certain topics (no sports?) and content types. In my opinion, this would be more interesting if it included time based graphs as Google Hot Trends does. NewsPulse only appears to be available for the U.S. Edition and not the International Edition at this time.

Overall

The new look and feel is a significant improvement over the recently retired look. They made a smart move in emphasizing video content, after all CNN is a television network. I would like to have seen a less bloated homepage. Do I really need to see the top seven stories from “Justice”, “Living” and” Latino in America?” Answer, no… I can click on those categories in the navigation bar if I was interested. Perhaps allow the user to delete unwanted content areas?

After all is said and done, I click away from the site impressed but at the same time disappointed that more wasn’t done given the money and resources that CNN has.

So what do you think, do you like the new CNN.com redesign? What do you think their budget for this was?

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