One of the few websites that I visit daily has recently been redesigned. At first I thought it simply looked worse, but I decided to give the new designs a chance. Now, a couple of weeks on I still don’t like it, and I’ve also figured out why. Webwereld is in Dutch by the way, so don’t bother trying to read the text in the screenshots.

Webwereld’s new design

Webwereld is one of Holland’s leading tech websites, and rightfully so. However, their new layout has sparked so much controversy that they even posted an article about it. A lot of the criticism focused on browser support, but that’s not the issue I have with it. The whole thing just became too bland. Pretty much everything important is gray or a rather dull blue The only things that really stand out are the red accents. So instead of focusing on the news, my eyes are now drawn to relatively unimportant things like the poll, the bullets in the widgets and the various buttons. The screenshot doesn’t include a large banner in the site’s header, but if one is there it completely overwhelms everything else in the page.

The first news story, although set in gray, gets some attention, mostly because of the accompanying picture. But from there the news items quickly become text-only and are pushed to the left column as simple links. The comment count with the little icons makes that listing quite messy and the lack of line spacing makes it harder to quickly scan the headlines. Here’s how that worked in the old layout. Much better don’t you agree?

In their article, Webwereld argues that they had to make more room for ads. Yet I hardly see any. The right sidebar is probably 336 pixels wide to accommodate large rectangle ads, but the first one is well below the fold. In fact, the old design, shown above, had more ad spaces in prominent locations.

What it didn’t have was room for extra widgets like the poll, popular posts, and some of Webwereld’s new functionality. I can completely understand why the old layout needed to be overhauled. But that does not mean that people do not still come to Webwereld for the news. Primarily at least. So the news is what needs to stand out. Something simple like adding a border to news items might do the trick. I really hope they fix this soon. For now, I’ll probably switch to RSS to get their updates in a more readable format.

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