The Guardian, which is by far the most read British newspaper on the web, has redesigned its homepage and a few peripheral pages - and it looks great, finally giving space to more news, photography and revealing far more of the rest of the site than before. I like that they have kept the top-level navigation essentially the same as before, as it always was quite an ‘individual’ design and it makes regular users feel at home. It has a few potential negative points though. It is a very wide (940px) layout which will upset the people who believe in elastic or liquid widths. It also jars when you click away from this page and go to an old-style content page and is even inconsistent when you click into the recently designed ‘blog’ areas, such as Comment is Free, as these are left-aligned, while the new homepage is centred. They have also made the interesting choice of keeping the old-style Guardian Unlimited logo, and not aligning it with the new logo featured in the print-version. That said, I expect many of these issues to be temporary while they update - it is often better to evolve website design rather than make huge radical departures from the past, especially with such a popular and well-loved site.

Update: More can be read about the thinking behind the redesign in their News Blog. Interestingly, I was looking for comment about the redesign everywhere on their site, and could not find it, even after an internal seach. I then used Google, and it found the article immediately.

By Andrew Fox on Saturday, 12th May, 2007 at 7:11 am