Herald Unveils New Site: Surprisingly Good

While you were busy sitting on the beach this weekend, the Herald unveiled its new website. Since we know a little something about new websites, and how hard they are to get off the ground, we took a look around to see what’s new.

The old site, for those of you who are unfamiliar with it, looked like this. It was straight out of newspapers websites 1.0 with awkward navigation bars both on the side and top of the page. The new page is anything but boring, with blue banners for news in the paper and red and orange for breaking news items and centralized navigation. Nice.
It’s still not as organized as Boston.com, but the Herald’s new site is a vast improvement. The commenting feature is a nice touch (a-hem, Boston.com), and the ability to adjust the text size and share an article is easily found at the top of the page. The byline is also nicely done, so you can browse recent articles by the same journalist and email them.

It’s not a perfect, of course. Our biggest gripe? It still doesn’t have a “Today’s Paper” page like Boston.com does to easily find the content from the print edition, leading to a lot of clicking around to find the content you read on the T in the morning. But in a two-newspaper-website town, it’s nice to see something new.