The New Omaha.com is a Disappointment
By: Mr. Wilson on
January 29, 2007
Then there are the negatives. None of the in-page advertisements load for me, so there are a half-dozen "The connection has timed out" messages across the screen. Not that I would see the ads anyway, thanks to Firefox's Adblock Plus extension. I did fire up the site in Internet Explorer 7, only to be attacked by not one but two popups. Are web developers seriously still using popups? Give me a break. And now I'm seeing an error message when I try to load the site. Darn first day gremlins.
I have just given the new site a quick glance, but so far I'm not impressed. From a usability standpoint, the designers made it difficult to see a whole bunch of articles at once. Instead, the user has to click or scroll to get a feel for his options. Contrast that with JournalStar.com, where the user can, at a glance, see many headlines and features. Additionally, portions of Omaha.com are inaccessible to many special needs users. Some features require JavaScript (e.g. search), and many features require a visual browser (e.g. the primary navigation). Those are big no-nos for the website of a major newspaper.
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I haven’t been able to access at all today.
popups and no opinion :(
opening jitters?
Looks like http://www.omaha.com is working right now, but omaha.com isn’t. For me, anyway.
Removing the daily article index and no editorials…LAME.
The OW-H really wants us to keep buying papers, it seems. :-(
I love the comments people can make on LJS, specially the opinion letters.
Was thinking about it today, how much longer will newspapers be around? and apparently with sites like this it will be a while.
I love you google homepage 😉
I didn’t even notice the absence of opinion content. That’s just weird.
The new design looks really amateurish to me.
Why isn’t everyone copying the NY times? That’s one of the very few newspaper websites I can stand.
Popups? really? What new browser doesn’t have a popup blocker installed? ugh.
FF 2.0 and I got one popup. but the adds take up 30% + of the viewable area anyway.
I think it looks pretty, just not enough content to keep me interested being a lincolnite.
Still at least they dropped the registering stuff. We had to give users a special account to login here at work. Anything to reduce spam. bugmenot rules.
No state news either (unless that will go in the Metro/Region section).
I assume this is still a work in progress because - otherwise - the World-Herald has just begun a long slide into near-total irrelevance.
By the way, loved the discussion down below about the Journal-Star’s supposed biases. Can we at least all agree that the LJS website is far and away superior than this piece of crap we’re seeing here.
Not that the old World-Herald site was great (or even good), but it was at least navigable with easy access to its content for registered users. Now, they’ve even forsaken that one advantage they had.
Blogging is going to be a whole lot more painful if I have to start regurgitating the World-Herald’s editorials by typing them from their print edition. Who do they think they are - the New York frickin’ Times?
Well, Kyle, there’s always the scanner + OCR method. Whether or not that’s faster and easier than typing by hand depends on how well Mavis and Mario taught you.
Well, it’s official:
Columns and the Opinion section are gone from Omaha.com
This is pretty high up on the “What the hell were they thinking?!?” scale.
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