CBSNews.com's New Look
Daniel Farber is editor-in-chief of CBSNews.com.
It's been more than a decade since CBSNews.com arrived on the Web. During that time, the site has undergone two major redesigns, evolving along with the rest of the Web as the technology improved and the Internet "pipes" gained the capacity to deliver a fire hose of rich-media content, such as CBS News television programming, to your computer and cell phone.
Here are images of CBSNews.com circa 2000, left, and our current site, right.
The last major CBSNews.com redesign was four years ago, which is virtual generation in Internet years. Over the last six months our team of designers and engineers has been at work on a new look, incorporating features based on data showing people are using the site and live "alpha" testing of prototypes.
This week we are entering the "beta" test phase of the next generation CBSNews.com. As you can see below, it's a dramatic visual change from the current site.
We had a few key goals with this CBSNews.com redesign -- make the site easier to navigate, more visual, faster and highlight our unique content.
The new home page features a rotating carousel of top stories on the left, next to the stack of the latest and most important headlines. The page also provides easy navigation of the news sections, such as Politics and World, and the CBS News programs. The CBS News Alert offers breaking news updates across the entire site.
In addition, highlights from CBS News programs, as well as the latest video, photo galleries and blogs, are highlighted on the page. CBS News program sites -- including Evening News, Face the Nation, 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, Sunday Morning and Up to the Minute -- have been updated to fit with the new design and highlight their unique programming.
Underneath the hood, we applied technology from our sister site CNET.com to deliver pages from our servers to your screen more rapidly than in our previous generation.
A small percent of random visitors to CBSNews.com will be presented with the new look for most of the pages on the site. You can help us fine tune the new site, which is a work-in-progress. If you land on the new pages, give us some feedback (fill out the brief feedback form linked at the top of the pages). We will be making changes and opening the revamped site up to additional users over the next several weeks as we head toward an official launch next month.
And here is a look at the redesign for the 60 Minutes page.
