Back in January I was sent a screenshot of the new abc.net.au/news, and while it was very much still a draft, it gave us some idea of what was coming.
The relaunched site is due to go live tomorrow, and from what I’ve seen its damn good. As you can see from the before and afters above, it is a much needed leap forward and has the most elegant and useful integration of video and audio I have seen on a news site. With simple audio and video flash players that appear and disappear thanks to the magic of ajax, it has Google Maps built right into the articles, which I immediately thought would be useless, until I realised how geographically challeneged I was and actually had no idea where Caloundra was (turns out its in Queensland).
The weather page is a brilliant, and even in fullscreen all the videos are more then enough, they load without any of the buffering that comes with the inconvenient WindowsMedia and RealPlayer formats that most news sites still use.
There is tons more to explore of the new site, but the incredibly simple and useful execution of audio/video and maps really are the top story of this news relaunch.
More screenshots below.. or visit abc.net.au/news sometime Monday.
All I can say is that it’s a true thing of beauty. It’s good to see a website that meets the standard of ABC News on TV and radio, it’s all been integrated very nicely.
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You can see the change…the ABC passed from being a “FOX News” to a “CNN International” look…The part I most like is the bottom part of the site :3
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Wow. Suck on that SBS.COM.AU
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I feel like my faith has been restored in the ABC’s design team. The bit on the main tour page I like the most:
Pages Load Faster
We have coded the site from scratch to adhere to web standards. In the process the page file size smaller than our previous design, and a lot smaller than other Australian news websites. This means faster browsing for you.
Although the start of the second sentence doesn’t make terrific sense, I like the sound of it. If it’s standards-compliant, I know I’ll love it.
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Finally ABC entering the 21st century, the old one looked like it was made in 1999.
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ABC News Online revamp delayed ’til 2pm (apparently because of the shootings in Melbourne today). Impressive list of links at the end:
Hell, there’s even a Google map.
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