Quick Notes On The New Daily Star Website Design

There are many things I like about the browsing experience in the new Daily Star, and I’m going to share share some of my first impressions with you.

Some of the technical details are handled well. You get the distinct feeling that the site conforms to current user experience best practices (like having legible, meaningful URLs instead of cryptic ones, a prominent search engine and a generally clear navigation structure). Expect a search engine bump for them soon.

There’s also a much better interaction with the readers (comments, social sharing and “popular posts” section) , a focus on contributors (each contributor gets his/her own page -sample-), and a better exposure for columnists who, despite their star credentials, were inexplicably buried deep in the previous iteration of the website. I will also guess that things in the back-end are now much more streamlined for the contributors.

The site doesn’t use flash, which makes it faster, more iPad friendly and search-engine-friendly. The ads are less intrusive and better positioned. All the annoying bells and whistles are gone. Good riddance.

They even managed to get some tricky details right. On many websites, when you’re reading an article and click the Facebook “Like” button, you are tricked into liking the site instead of the article. In the new Daily Star, liking an article actually shares that article on your facebook with proper NFO (news feed optimization).

Of course there are some kinks, especially on the aesthetic side.

The site is a bit too white, and could use a bit of CSS tweaking. Some of the design choices make the Star look more like Yahoo! than the Wall Street Journal. The site is a bit too generous in using the vertical space (the feature box is needlessly high and the tabs are too spaced out), which pushes some of the important content (like the columnists box) way below the fold.

In general though, the design (well executed by IDS ) is a very big improvement on the previous one, and something tells me that this is still a work in progress and will rise to better heights with time.. Mabrook Daily Star..