Those hoping to get the dirt on why Christina Aguilera marred “The Star Spangled Banner” during last night’s Super Bowl game and what viewers should expect this award season had to wait until mid-day on Monday to find out their news on Gawker (News - Alert) Media sites.
Gawker Media, which introduced its redesigned Web page today, had a bit more to worry about than a relaunch this morning as an outage bombed its network, which includes Gizmodo, Lifehacker and iO9.
While its new site design has elicited complaints, instead of addressing those concerns today, Gawker was busy extinguishing the flames that erupted when the sites went down. Kerin Cosford (@kerin), for example, tweeted, “can’t work out if the redesigned Gawker sites are broken or just really, really bad,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
With the site back up by the end of the day, and people able to receive their dire Super Bowl post-game gossip, it would seem that complaints will now be directed back to the redesign.
The biggest change with the new site is that the front page is now dominated by one big story (or a roundup of several different stories), and a list of headlines appear in a column down the right side of the page.
“This allows us to display big, gorgeous images and videos on the front page of our site,” Gawker wrote today. “And it allows readers to easily scan headlines without having to scroll down the entire page.”
According to Nick Denton (News - Alert), the founder of Gawker, in this cyber age viewers prefer to receive their news in a more succinct, faster way. While speaking at the IAB Mixx conference in New York last September, Denton told AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka that online media is soon to become more like television and less like a newspaper.
“People don’t really want to read text,” Denton said. “They want videos, they want images, bigger, more lavish.”
“It means a screen which is less constrained by the need to have three or four ads and every single bit of content on one screen,” he added.
Because people want more, the new site also allows more room for visitors to comment, as the commenter’s name is displayed in a larger font and the site accommodates larger video and picture uploads. The design also eliminated social media widgets, other than one for Facebook (News - Alert), a move that caused concern for site visitors, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Gawker just can’t seem to catch a break these past few months as it is still dealing with the fallout from being hacked at the end of December of last year. The attack on blogs including Gawker, Gizmodo and Jezebel exposed account information on as many as 1.4 million people, several unrelated companies had to freeze their accounts and force users to reset passwords.
Carrie Schmelkin is a Web Editor for TMCnet. Previously, she worked as Assistant Editor at the New Canaan Advertiser, a 102-year-old weekly newspaper, covering news and enhancing the publication�s social media initiaitives. Carrie holds a bachelor�s degree in journalism and a bachelor�s degree in English from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Carrie Schmelkin