and see an index page of all the topics.
In the middle is our image display carousel. Just sit and watch and the images will change for you. Click on the numbered boxes at the top right hand corner and you can return to any image/link that caught your fancy.
We’re pretty pleased with the new site and hope you agree that it’s a big step forward. Click around, have a play. We promise that nothing here will bite. If anything’s strange or confusing — or if you just want to tell us what you think, drop a line to 
Wall St was down 94 overnight, its biggest fall in a month, while the local market is down 66.
The new Crikey website
|
Having come this far, you will have noticed that Crikey has just changed its website — quite a lot — and the changes are more than cosmetic, so this is something we need to talk about. First, here are the top 5 things you need to know about the new website:
Do you have questions about the website? Our help page is here to, ahem, help. And now, a message from Crikey editor Jonathan Green: The first thing to say about the new crikey.com.au is that we are running a lot of material from other sources. We’ve even changed our Crikey tagline; “Now with extra source” is the new one and that’s what our new site will be full of, the best of the web. You’ll still get a taste of our Crikey originals too of course, but we’ve decided that it’s time the Crikey online presence spread its wings. We believe that Crikey is more than just a daily independent, online news source. We think Crikey is a point of view, a filter, a perspective, a way of seeing the world. We also believe that working with the internet is all about embracing the stuff that other people do. There’s no ego in this. Sometimes a story that Crikey people have written will be a big thing on our website. More often it will be a story, or a video, or a podcast, or an interconnected series of animated infographics from some other source. What we’re hoping to do is bring it all together in one place. It’s ambitious, it will keep us busy, but we hope you will be intrigued, informed, sometimes even excited and amazed, by the choices that we make. Some features you should know about: Let’s start at the top of our home page, with the navigation bar. Here is a really small version of it:
Your old favourite Crikey subject categories are there, Politics, Media and Business, but we’ve created new ones to reflect the breadth of what we’re going to be covering — that’s Environment and Life — along with a quick link to the landing page for Crikey Blogs. Next to the right are links to handy index and gallery pages. There’s a new and quite splendid home for the Crikey Video collection — our fabled Videos of the Day and many many more, a comprehensive First Dog On The Moon gallery, an index of all our regular columns and columnists and something new, The Reading Room — a list of our favourite websites for you to explore at leisure. Have a click and explore. On the next row are our Hot Topics. These will change depending on what’s in the news or much talked about at any given moment. Click on a subject and you’ll head to a topic index page with stories collated around that Hot Topic theme. The Hot Topics are produced by pulling together the most popular article topics applied by the Crikey editorial team. Each article or link loaded to the Crikey website is given a series of category designations and subject tags. These all help the story find its appropriate place within the architecture of the website. The most common subject tags become Hot Topics. Click on one and check out the hot topic index page it produces. Or if you like, click on the red Hot Topics lozenge Next is our “Above the Fold” area (funny old newspaper term seamlessly translated to website design):
Surrounding the carousel are headlines and links. The green headlines are Crikey original content. The black ones are content sourced from external non-Crikey sites. Click on one of these and you’ll be taken to the originating website for that story. Have a read, then come back to Crikey for more. Click on a green headline and you’ll stay within our site, and be taken to a Crikey story page:
Things have changed here too of course. To the right of the story you’ll see a number of icons, all pretty self explanatory, you can comment on the story, print it, email it to a friend of share it using your favourite social media network. Next you’ll see a series of related story headlines, all drawn from the full Crikey archive, under that, a selection or related topics, some subject tags that we think might interest readers of the original story. At the foot of the story you’ll find … so long as you are logged in, a screen where you can write a comment. Join the discussion! Let’s go back to the homepage now, moving down a little from the above-the-fold area to the long horizontal element beneath it. This displays a selection of highlighted content, regular features and stuff that’s a little bit special. Click and explore.
Under that, are a series of what we call category boxes. Again, you’ll find combinations of Crikey original and externally sourced content, this time grouped into subject headings. The first category is politics. To the right of that main heading, are the sub-categories that we are using to further sub-divide that content.
In politics they are Australia and The World. Click around, and you’ll get the idea. Click on politics, and you’ll go to the Politics sub-home page. There are even more sub-categories and sub-category boxes here. The basic idea is to break down the content into layer on layer, each grouped around categories and tags. Every one of the category boxes works in the same way. Let’s look over the right of the page now. First thing you’ll notice, right up the top under the navigation bar and immediately to the right of the picture carousel is a little square devoted to the Crikey Daily Mail subscriber edition. What’s in this square will change, depending on whether you’re a subscriber or not. If you are, once you’re logged in, you’ll be able to use this area to check your account details and read through a collection of recent email editions. If you’re not a Crikey Daily Mail subscriber you’ll see three tabs inviting you to join Crikey’s Inner Sanctum.
Moving down, you’ll come to our old friend the feature bar and under that a panel of breaking news feeds. Next is a panel of recent posts from the Crikey Blogs network and under that a feed from selected Crikey Twitter accounts.
|
|
|
21 Comments
I strongly endorse this product or event.
I don’t mind the new site, but it does not recognize my old log in. Can’t seem to find a subscribers only section either - will continue reading the help section
I’m with the last guy Sean? My former log in keeps telling me to log in!
Struth, my dinkus just burned and crashed.
Looking great. Love it. 5 stars (or green traffic light)
Okay signed up using same email and password. My subscription details are correct .
Three out of four of my neighbours prefer the new Crikey - the other one’s just a trouble maker.
I have two internet connections and several computers with different operating systems. My login worked and I’m subscribed until 2010. But I seem to have exactly the same content when I’m logged in on this machine as I do on a computer on the alternate connection where I’m not logged in. The only difference I can find is that I can comment on this page when I’m logged in. There is no comment box where I’m not logged in.
No subscriber emails today? No subscriber content? No Crikey Says? etc. It’s all disappeared or not accessible. Have I missed something somewhere?
One really good thing about the new Crikey is that the pages no longer take half an hour to load. Happy about that. Not so sure about all the non-Crikey content. We have other means of accessing that, and there is a danger it will look like padding.
A hotch-potch, a mess and a disaster.
I cannot make my way around this counter-intuitive site at all efficiently. The old email format allowed several ways to either scroll trough or click to the articles. I now am faced with multiple dud connections, no real idea where to go next, no indication of material already visited and no way to either see or add to comments from the email.
After 3 hours I have finally found this page and long winded article, essentially by working my way down through each article as it came up in the email and then connecting to (mainly) dead links. How I found this page is odd - I was looking to see comments on an article.
Back to this specific page…
If it requires ten minutes of careful reading to understand a road map, then the designer of said map is not properly literate.
Guys, put simply, I am lost and I assume that many of your faithful are also, so quit slapping yourselv es on the back for a moment and fix the g_dd_mned thing.
The current tally appears to be 50/50 for those ten opr so who have made it thus far. The other 99% haven’t found this web page yet and presumably are best considered to be in the “not happy” camp.
And as for the speed of your server: Immediately after I received your daily email I tried to go to your site via the link in the email. No luck the first dozen or so times - the connection timed out, regardless of whatever I tried. dAfter approximately 30 minutes, I got through.
Now that most offices are closed, it becomes apparent that a considerable number of employees are wasting paid time on prvate reading of Crikey. Not my problem and presumably not yours either, but this is not a good look, especially for a site which sends its email after the lunch break.
Before you ask, yes I do spend my own time reading Crikey. It never sullies my office time.
Horrid and failed.
Fix, please.
Good work, Crikey. Interesting to see such a large implementation of WordPress. So far the new design is working well.
Oh, the articles are much nicer to read now. I think the typeface is much better. Nice one.
I like the new website, but find it difficult to find the crikey-only format. Is there a link on the website to do this or only through the help page (http://www.crikey.com.au/about/help/)?
Hi Paul, bookmark this page for Crikey subscriber content: http://www.crikey.com.au/?cat=-16648
Hold on, it’s a little different to that. Here are the links you want:
http://www.crikey.com.au/paywall/ … all Crikey Daily Mail subscriber-only articles
http://www.crikey.com.au/?cat=-16648 … all Crikey original articles (only Daily Mail subscribers will be able to see the paywalled ones)
The new site is much more readable as I have requested for some months - so thank you - but not yet easy to navigate. I love my daily hit with politics and news - but was disappointed when I tried the new Canberra Calling, The two speakers dropped their voices to inaudible levels - so I gave up very quickly.
Better luck next time.
I think it’s fundamentally ill-conceived. “The best of the web” sounds great, but your best and my best aren’t the same thing. In practice, people collate their own “best-ofs” from different sites either manually or by using the various technical means we have these days. As part of that exercise of checking the sites that interest me I come to crikey to read crikey authors; all your re-heated content from other sources just gets in my way.
I hope you have lots of data about time spent on your site pre-change and examine users’ behaviour on the new site carefully over coming weeks. I know my own reaction in the last few days has been to enter the site, get impatient with the sheer amount of material on display, and move quicker than I otherwise would have. If the data shows others are having the same reaction, I hope you move to fix it quickly, rather than just rationalising and self-congratulating and insisting how great it is. Crikey is an important test case for finding a model to produce quality journalism in new media, and my hunch is you’ve just killed it.
What’s Crikey?
Simply horrible. Where to start? At first glance it looks like someone has scanned the front page of a newspaper, loaded it into a blunderbuss and fired point blank at my monitor. What was once a somewhat clean site has turned into an incomprehensible mess. It would be less problematic if the columns were symmetrical with some separation, but there is no space whatsoever.
One this page alone, I’ve got three things competing for my attention by constantly flashing; fortunately I am not epileptic. Because the sections are followed by “special features” it interrupts visual scanning and makes the reader work too hard. Finally, it looks as if the designers couldn’t decide wether they wanted a “two column look” or simply text running across the page and a committee stepped in and “compromised” and chose both.
To complete this rant, I suggest the designers read “Don’t make me think”, by Steve Krug and try again. Also may they and other designers reading repeat after me: “The internet is NOT TV or a newspaper”.
Today is Thursday.
Today’s Crikey via the web site is Wednesday.
Either I’ve lived 48 hours in 24, or someone has forgotten to post Thursday’s news up on your web site. Best wishes, Jackie French
Have a back to top click at bottom of page?
Kohler’s back to works well.