The Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday have opened out a beta version of their new site today.
Here's the current one for comparison.
Needless to say the new one is a considerable improvement on the last one - not that the 'nostaligic' design has held back the site's growth at all. Search engines just love all those celebrity picture galleries and lifestyle stories.
So what do we have?
Well, a large picture gallery takes pride of place. And there's a heavy column of more than 30 celebrity pics down the right-hand side. News gets one big story plug on the left and the rest is consigned to headlines in a box. And there's a plug for six of the editor's favourites.
Strangely, the page above the fold seems more text heavy than below it. It's not the most graceful design; typefaces seem squashed and there are multiple, conflicting types of headlines, tabs, underlines, boxes, bullet points and icons that could all have come from different designs.
The masthead looks disconcertingly similar to that of The Telegraph with the monochrome, Old English-esque typeface. And - oh, what's this? An ill-advised Hitwise icon stuck to the right-hand side?
"Number one website according to Hitwise between October and December"?
Publishers could plaster their sites in all manner of claims about web traffic performance - most dwell time, most UK users (probably stats the Mail's audience would appreciate) or most Bulgarian web users.
But it's confusing for consumers and advertisers and commercially irresponsible - especially from a firm that does not disclose the source of its data. ABCe is trying to standardise web statistics for the overall good of the industry and works on a non-profit basis to do that. While the marketing department might be nagging to get any old badge on the masthead, it is ultimately undermining the longer term transparency and clarity of the online publishing industry.
Yes, I write for the Guardian and yes, we're ahead of Mail Online according to ABCe, blah blah blah. But I would declare the same point of view whatever the ABCe figures say. This is all getting very tiresome.
Back to the Mail Online's beta - what do you make of it?
Update: The beta site ("number one UK website between October and December 2007, according to Hitwise"...) is closed from 7pm to 9am, UK time. How quaint.
