Shooting yourself in the foot

In one of my former incarnations I ran a postgraduate diploma in multimedia design. That was seven years ago, but the essentials of design have not changed. Yet every time a website relaunches, it’s a disaster.

Media Week redesigned a few months a go and introduced free registration. It took me the best part of two weeks and several emails to get in. At one stage, I got so fed up I look the site off the Links page at Magforum.com. Now, Press Gazette has gone and done it. As usual, the changes are not for the better:

- less of what I want to see can be seen on my screen at home. My day job is as a journalist in a multimedia newsroom on a national newspaper and my screen there is no better than the one at home. The redesign will not benefit journalists;
- the lefthand navigation column has disappeared, so to find the magazine section, you have to look under the ‘Home’ dropdown menu (weird logic website designers use);
- the names of all the 16,000 Press Gazette stories dating back to the late 1990s – an archive of which the paper is justifiably proud – have been changed, so links to these on web pages no longer work (I think this is called ‘shooting yourself in the foot’).

Why don’t designers do any testing with real people?

I’ve told PG about the problems and they are hoping to write a script to address the problem with the page links. However, I’ll bet the budget for the redesign will have gone over by half and there’s no money to pay a programmer to sort it out; so don’t hold your breath.

The typography may be better and the site may make better use of hi-res screens (in other words it’s been designed for other designers, who are the ones most likely to have big screens), but this is a fat lot of good if the usability has gone down the plug hole.

If the PG‘s designers – Jody Willis at Abacus E-Media and Michael Crozier – had handed this in to me as a student project, they definitely would not be getting a distinction.

Press Gazette

Media Week

What Emap has lost

David Hepworth knows his magazines. It’s an impression that is reinforced every time I read his Guardian column. He – and his Emap alumni at Development Hell – are also a reminder of what Emap has lost.

Twenty years ago, East Midland Allied Press was a regional newspaper running around biting the ankles of IPC with magazines such as Smash Hits and PC User (and demonstrating the digital future with Micronet). But in 1999 it tried to throw its weight around in the US. In retrospect, the £700m loss on Petersen was a shock that destroyed the company’s corporate touch.

It is fours years since Emap last demonstrated how launching a magazine should be done – Grazia was inspired. Now, it seems to have forgotten how to run a company – just look at the way its French arm went down the tubes. It’s been bad news all over, with closures galore, the demise of FHM in the US, and Emap couldn’t even pick the right paper size for the Car relaunch.

So Tom Moloney’s departure was no surprise.

He’s come a long way since he arrived with the company as advertisement director of Educational Computing. David Arculus, who with Robin Miller led the expansion of magazines at Emap, has called Moloney ‘the most talented person I’d ever met’. (Though Moloney is not the only advertising boss of Educational Computing who could lay claim to such a title – Seven Publishing founder Seamus Geoghegan being the other.)

Emap cast around for six months before appointing Moloney in 2003, but had been spoilt for choice – between Arculus and Miller – in 1997. It’s unlikely to be spoilt for choice now.

As for Hepworth, his latest column gives a thumbs-up to ‘classic glossy’ Portfolio as a lure for wealthy readers but feels Monocle should be a TV programme (which, ironically, is what founder Tyler Brûlé tried to do before the magazine). Condé Nast’s Portfolio is ‘full of long pieces that nobody will read and little boxy things that everybody will’. If only everything were that simple.