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Posts Tagged ‘Radical Redesign’

CNN.com Gets a Radical Redesign

CNN.com, one of the top 25 websites in the US, just announced a radical redesign of its service at a press event in New York City. The new CNN.com homepage will be split up into three parts. On the left, CNN will now highlight breaking news stories, the middle section will feature older stories and a ‘highlights’ section, and the right sidebar will be customizable with personalized weather and sports scores. Right beneath the fold, the new CNN will feature a list of ‘editor’s choice’ stories – similar to the NYTimes’s ‘Inside NYTimes.com’ section. The new site will go live next Monday.

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According to CNN’s General Manager of CNN.com Kenneth Estenson, CNN.com currently gets about 1.7 billion page views and 100 million video views every month. In total the CNN homepage has been called up over 120 billion times since its first iteration in 1996.

CNN clearly put a lot of thought into this redesign. As William Hsu, CNN’s VP for News Advertising Sales for Asia Pacific told Exchange4media.com earlier this week, the CNN team “did a lot of research, biometric research, in Europe” (update: a CNN spokesperson just told us that this study was done independent of the site redesign). According to Hsu, these studies showed that very few users ever went beyond the current homepage. Because of this, the new homepage will show far more content but will also make it easier for readers to navigate the site.

More Emphasis on Video – Including Videos from TED

At today’s press event, CNN also stressed that the new site will integrate more of its TV product. Instead of keeping video and text separate, the new CNN.com will bring the two together. 50% of CNN’s users already watch both the video and read the story, so bringing the two closer together is a smart move for CNN. CNN also announced a partnership with TED, which will bring TED videos to a completely new audience.

NewsPulse

The new homepage will also have a new feature called ‘NewsPulse.’ This will allow users to reorganize news stories by correspondent, subject, or keyword. Today’s press event was low on specifics, but this looks like a good way to personalize CNN’s homepage and to find interesting content on the site.

Similarity to CNN Go

CNN also recently launched CNN Go, which focuses on news for the Asian market and also has a more magazine-like layout.

What About the Competition?

We have also heard that MSNBC will soon launch a redesign of its own. While we aren’t aware of any specifics yet, the new MSNBC will focus on adding value to news wire stories by bringing together more material from NBC’s affiliates and a larger focus on interactive elements designed specifically for MSNBC.

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Mozilla-Based Postbox Email App Launches to Public

Think desktop email is dead? Not so says the latest entrant to this field, San Francisco-based startup Postbox, who is today revealing the final release of their desktop email application based on Mozilla technology. Originally launched into beta a year ago, Postbox has a heavy focus on search and organization with a primary goal of addressing email users’ information overload issues. Like Mozilla’s own Thunderbird email application, Postbox exists only as downloadable software. However, unlike other desktop programs, Postbox natively integrates web services into its interface, including Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

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When you first get started with Postbox, you’re promoted to select from a list of web-based email accounts including Gmail, AOL, Windows Live Hotmail, and Yahoo! mail. If you’re using the app for anything else, you can select “other email account” instead. You’re able to import RSS feeds and Newsgroup accounts, too.

Postbox Features

Search: Once configured, Postbox looks very much like any other email program you’ve used in the past – this is no radical redesign like Google Wave plans on being. There’s a message list, preview pane, folder lists, favorite folders, etc. However, the killer features in this application don’t have anything to do with its design. Instead, what makes Postbox so appealing to power emailers are its search and organization features. The application can help you find anything in your email whether a contact, an address, a link, a picture, an attachment, or even just a snippet of text. Searches appear in Postbox’s tabbed interface where visual results – like photo thumbnails, for example – make finding the right result easy.

Topics: Similar to Gmail’s “labels,” Postbox uses “topics” for organizing email, a system that helps you stay on top of your current projects. And as with Gmail, messages can be flagged with multiple topics. This can be done either after you receive them or as you compose an email. Postbox will also automatically tag future emails within a thread with the same topic.

Compose Sidebar: Also in the Compose window is a sidebar which provides easy access to images, attachments, links, contacts, and signatures stored elsewhere in your email. Click on any of these icons and a search box appears allowing you to quickly retrieve items.

To-Do’s: For getting things done, Postbox lets you turn email messages into “to do” items which pushes them to the top of your inbox where they stayed pinned until complete.

Inspector Pane: When viewing an email message, the so-called “Inspector Pane” on the right summarizes the content detected within that email conversation including information about the sender, attachments, images, links, addresses, etc. What’s interesting is that the sender’s profile picture can actually be retrieved from Facebook or Twitter if you’ve linked your accounts from the Web Services menu (under Tools).

Extensions: Although Postbox doesn’t include a calendar of its own, the Lightning add-on, one of several supported extensions lets you view your calendar as a separate tab in Postbox. It provides access to your Gmail calendar, too.

A Lot to Like

Even though many email users are happy with their web-based solution of choice, there’s a lot to like about Postbox’s desktop app. For example, we especially like the ability to post from our email directly to Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed. And what we wouldn’t give for visual search like this in Gmail! Postbox’s search features are robust yet simple to use and the handy “Inspector Pane” is a useful tool that could easily become an essential component to your email workflow.

For these reasons and more, it’s no surprise that this application made our list of favorites earlier this year. (See: Still Shiny: 23 Apps We’re Using One Month Later).

With the public release of version 1.0 of this application, the company isn’t introducing any major upgrades, but that shouldn’t stop you from giving it a look if you’re interested in desktop email clients. Postbox is available as a free trial, but sells for $39.95 if you decide to purchase.

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