Dana Bell

The Tyler Morning Telegraph unveiled its new web site today, and I obviously went straight to the computer to check it out. You will have to consider that I've visited their old site on numerous occasions. The new tylerpaper.com is a tremendous improvement over the old.

The site has a left side index of categories, both news and commercial that follows you through much of the site. Of course, preferring salesmanship over service, the top links are to Autos, Jobs, Real Estate, while links to the News, Sports, Business sections are a couple page clicks down in the list.

That's just another proof that the news media is not as much about news, keeping us informed, as it is about selling advertising, although that may be an economic necessity.

The top of each inside page includes breadcrumbs. Simple, but useful for getting your bearings if you surf the site at all. The banner includes a search, and an easy to read weather note on temps and a link to more.

It looks like the inside of a newspaper; it's busy; it has narrow columns; and it has distracting advertisements. Of course, a newspaper should look busy to some degree, although I prefer a more organized and aesthetic site.

Four columns is not unusual, but the blending, or lack of blending of different types of material in each column is confusing, and annoying. A less is more concept might prove to be more practical and appealing.

There's the sectional links (Local, World, Sports, Business), the special section links (rants, outdoors, arts), the ad sections (Auto, Jobs), separate sections for Top Jobs, Top Homes, Online Extras, Site Services, the Section links, (News, Sports, Business), the Immediate Links (Breaking News, Top Stories, Sports again), a couple of front page teasers, and advertisements. It's enough to make you dizzy.

It's a newspaper. You would think they would know that you can't cram everything on the front page. You would think they would imitate some of the proven traditions of journalistic layout. The individual sections are semi-organized, but as a whole it a potpourri of links. Just having an ad on page one is a commonly accepted taboo, in my opinion, although I suspect that is more an advertiser/retailer issue. Too much Ice Cream will make you sick; too much Peltier makes me sick.

Considering design, I would hope that this site is just a work in progress. It lacks a lot in organization, color, spacing, and graphics. But, then, just having a little less could make it much more. Technically, it's also a failure. It's designed for Internet Explorer, for users with wide screens and that have the browser maximized. Narrow the screen in Firefox and some content on the right side overlaps the left. The biggest failure is its non-compliance with W3C standards. If you visit http://validator.w3.org/check, and enter the tylerpaper.com URL, you will see a list of 265 errors on the front page. That non-compliance is the biggest reason that web sites aren't compliant with more than one browser variant.

Of course, there are some bugs in it, as you might expect from a new site. Some of the links are broken in the inside pages, including the Obituaries page, which is yet another thing you get to from the front page.

Again, considering where they came from, I'll give them a kudos.