Opinion on the New Daily Cal website
So the Daily Cal unveiled a beta of its new site design this week. They’ve listed a list of improvements yesterday. As a guy who’s worked a couple of websites, I decided to offer a critique of the site.
Appearance
I must say the site does not appear drastically different, which is fine. It’s got a new color scheme, which is more lively. I have to say it might be time to get rid of the gray background and switch to just white. Also, there should be no It’s So please get rid of the blinking graphics next to the online articles. Replace it with the word “online” in a different color. Also links seems to behave differently when viewed Firefox vs. Internet Explorer, as hovering the mouse over them produces two different behaviors. Finally, there seem to be a number of spacing problems as empty space seems to appear in many places namely in between the articles and the footer.
Features
I haven’t seen any of the new photo features yet or that new weather section they promised, so no judgement on that until they arrive (though really if you include them in the article, they should have been there). They do add comments and trackbacks to the new articles, but they feel a bit slapped together. They’re powered by Haloscan, the popular Blogger addon, which is easy to use and set up, but also don’t feel like they are integrated to the site (probably because they really aren’t). Still missing though are RSS feeds, which are a very handy way of keeping track of updates, though Haloscan does provide a comments feed at http://www.haloscan.com/members/rss.php?user=dailycal.
Overall
The site is an improvement, and was due for an upgrade. However, the site feels like it was merely patched up, and doing that may make it harder to add the missing features like feeds and integrated comments. There remains a lot of work to be done on the site.
wow. slow news week on calstuff. whats wrong with you people? did you get girlfriends (or boyfriends) or something?
Comment by mano — November 2, 2005 @ 1:32 am
Decent upgrade, but I would have preferred for them to have done something about their hosting instead. Their site is down like 50% of the times I try visit, or maybe it’s just me.
Comment by patr — November 2, 2005 @ 2:39 am
Why doesn’t the Daily Cal fix its online archive?????
DailyCal.org premiered in 1995, yet the archives only go back to 2003. Why don’t the Daily Cal people put the old archives back online????
Reading the Daily Bruin, I notice their archives go back a decade. The Daily Cal really should take a cue from UCLA!!!!
Comment by Joe. E — November 2, 2005 @ 6:40 am
It’s an improvement, but it certainly could be better. It needs to look more “slick”.
Comment by Bhanu Singh — November 2, 2005 @ 9:32 am
Actually, there are archives for those years, but I forgot where they were.
Comment by Beetle — November 2, 2005 @ 10:35 am
Who cares about the content, it’d just be nice if they actually updated the !@%@@! content every day and the server didn’t crash all the time. Priorities, boys, priorities.
Comment by iliketapioca — November 2, 2005 @ 11:12 am
“Their site is down like 50% of the times I try visit”
“Who cares about the content, it’d just be nice if they actually updated the !@%@@! content every day and the server didn’t crash all the time.”
trust me, people are working on that. the Daily Cal is basically in the technological stone age. the entire newsroom is run on iMacs from 1999 that crash every ninety seconds.
Comment by rwb — November 2, 2005 @ 3:18 pm
The Daily Cal’s idiot online editor decided to chuck 7 years worth of Daily Cal stories down the drain. And that’s why you can’t find it.
Kind of stupid, isn’t it???
Comment by Joe. E — November 2, 2005 @ 9:11 pm