Gawker’s redesign : What’s wrong with Gawker’s redesign
Gawker’s redesign : What’s wrong with Gawker’s redesign:
The Gawker posts themselves aren’t particularly easy to read. You have to scroll past a large picture before even reaching the text of the article. Worst of all, Gawker’s comment section — long cherished for its witty contributions — is not particularly intuitive. For at least a year now Gawker has tried to place emphasis on the best comments, but with the redesign it may not be immediately clear to a new reader that you have to click on “All” to read all of them. In the end, it just simply looks at first glance as if most posts only have one or two comments.
Many media critics note that Denton has history on his side, and I certainly agree. His staff memos, often leaked to Romensko, offer more insight on digital media and the future of news than 90% of Mashable articles. He has grown Gawker Media into a powerhouse that has left most of its blog brethren in its dust. But over the last few months he has issued several quotes about Gawker’s strategy that seem suspect. Recently, for instance, he claimed that Facebook is the only social media traffic driver of any worth and that Twitter is all but useless.
True to form, the new design does not feature any social media sharing buttons other than Facebook’s. Whatever metrics Denton was using to make that calculation, he’s wrong. If you look at bit.ly click metrics, a piece published on a site like The Oatmeal or The Onion can get upwards of 50,000 clicks. And that only includes the Twitter users who use Bit.ly and not other shortening services. Gawker Media may be big, but it’s not so big that it can disregard 50,000 pageviews on a single article as useless. Yes, I agree that news sites can get a little too enthusiastic about including every social media icon, no matter how inconsequential, but you can’t deny Twitter’s ability to quickly and effectively spread content.
The Gawker posts themselves aren’t particularly easy to read. You have to scroll past a large picture before even reaching the text of the article. Worst of all, Gawker’s comment section — long cherished for its witty contributions — is not particularly intuitive. For at least a year now Gawker has tried to place emphasis on the best comments, but with the redesign it may not be immediately clear to a new reader that you have to click on “All” to read all of them. In the end, it just simply looks at first glance as if most posts only have one or two comments.
Many media critics note that Denton has history on his side, and I certainly agree. His staff memos, often leaked to Romensko, offer more insight on digital media and the future of news than 90% of Mashable articles. He has grown Gawker Media into a powerhouse that has left most of its blog brethren in its dust. But over the last few months he has issued several quotes about Gawker’s strategy that seem suspect. Recently, for instance, he claimed that Facebook is the only social media traffic driver of any worth and that Twitter is all but useless.
True to form, the new design does not feature any social media sharing buttons other than Facebook’s. Whatever metrics Denton was using to make that calculation, he’s wrong. If you look at bit.ly click metrics, a piece published on a site like The Oatmeal or The Onion can get upwards of 50,000 clicks. And that only includes the Twitter users who use Bit.ly and not other shortening services. Gawker Media may be big, but it’s not so big that it can disregard 50,000 pageviews on a single article as useless. Yes, I agree that news sites can get a little too enthusiastic about including every social media icon, no matter how inconsequential, but you can’t deny Twitter’s ability to quickly and effectively spread content.
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