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Gannett Rolls Out Cookie Cutter Web Design Template

The Tennessean.com (Nashville), News-Press.com (Ft. Myers), DesMoinesRegister.com, and maybe others, I didn’t check them all, have made the transition to the same website design.

Courier-Journal.com is in beta. Login: louisvil-beta Password: louisvil

Coming soon to your Gannett city.

I like the design, and if it works, why not roll it out nationally. Takes out the problem of ad placement for national advertisers, centralizes design/support staff. Lot of advantages. I don’t see any downside.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Gannett Rolls Out Cookie Cutter Web Design Template”

  1. coder Says:
    April 5th, 2008 at 9:48 pm

    The trouble is, the code behind it is a pile of crap.

    Anybody with the ability to View Source can see that these new templates break every rule of html, css, accessibility, etc.

    These aren’t new technologies or languages. You’d think someone at a mega-corp like Gannett would have some sort of clue.

    The result: a design that is bad for users, bad for search engine results, and a giant pile of dung for anyone who might have to work with the code.

    Sad.

  2. mvanpatten Says:
    April 6th, 2008 at 8:48 am

    Thanks for your thoughts. I guess this falls under the category if it works, who cares? except for coders. The value to users is in the eye of user. SEO? probably sheer volume of content gets good results.
    Code dung? Only matters to coders.

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