Sheesh, talk about taking things too seriously… Regular readers will recall that Benton made a joke yesterday about how coincidental it was that the Star’s web redesign was launched a mere two days after O’Neil’s little disquisition about the, er, quality of the paper’s web site. Well, sometimes things don’t play well to certain audiences, we suppose. Like, for instance, those who do the designing. The comments:
I didn’t just throw the kansascity.com redesign together in 2 days to make a commenter happy. It took about 8 months, while rolling out ideas like pets and varsity, to get it to the point of where it is now. kansascity.com has about 1000 sections, receives over 31 million unique visitors a month and is THE future of The Star.
All of that is enough to make everyone of the major stakeholders try to “leave their mark” on what was supposed to be just a simple re-tooling of the navigation and advertising. I had to force my hand on any content changes just to get even a few pixels of padding here and there.
To quote Costanza: Easy, big fella. We never seriously thought we were responsible for it. We’re jokemakers. It’s what we do. And hey, nice job on the design! We all know just how crucial that KC Pets component is.
UPDATE FROM BENTON:
Indeed, my tongue was planted firmly in cheek while writing that piece…we’re pretty sure a butterfly flapping its wings in Asia had more of an effect on the redesign timetable than our commentary did. Unfortunately, technology has yet to develop an effective emoticon to represent sarcasm.
I would like to add that we do appreciate the difficult task Web designers face in serving many masters on a single news site, with every division/section jockeying for prime real estate on the home page. ‘Tis a thankless job, likely made worse by the awful push-down, cube and skyscraper ads taking up valuable space.
Oh, and regarding this comment:
Your silly blog most certainly did NOT push the Star to design a site in two days.
We prefer to think of ourselves as “jaunty” or “sprightly.” Perhaps even “puckish.”
Am I to understand that a website that “has about 1000 sections, receives over 31 million unique visitors a month and is THE future of The Star” has only ONE PERSON dedicated to making all the changes to the site?
I respect the hard work and dedication that is put in by this web designer, but if this website is THE FUTURE of the paper, I would have a HUGE TEAM of people dedicated to making it look good and run smoothly – a least as many people as they have working on INK.
Oh, and I would have made this a priority 5 YEARS AGO.
P.S.
Am I wrong, but is he also intimating that people within The Star were constantly meddling (trying to “leave their mark”) in the design, causing delays? Can’t the middle management bean counters get out of the way and let the professionals do their jobs?
No wonder people call old media companies like The Star “lumbering giants” – they can’t make any real progress without having 3 years worth of meetings to come to any decisions!