It’s here. And it’s a lot like a giant entertainment website.
But it does look very, very nice. Is it functional? No time to find out now, although we will note that it FINALLY has RSS feeds, although none of them are working in Net NewsWire…yet.
It’s here. And it’s a lot like a giant entertainment website.
But it does look very, very nice. Is it functional? No time to find out now, although we will note that it FINALLY has RSS feeds, although none of them are working in Net NewsWire…yet.
Am I the only one who finds the layout eerily similar to the redesigned CBR that has been around for a couple of months?…
//Am I the only one who finds the layout eerily similar to the redesigned CBR that has been around for a couple of months?…//
Hey, at least they finally figured out how to get Matt Brady’s name off of everybody else’s interviews.
Wow. Never be afraid to publish a beta, I guess.
I don’t really read Newsarama all that often but just a quick look at the site and it sort of reminds me of other sites. There is an awful lot of clicking now it seems, and everything is divided into sections so you have to actively search out articles rather than just having them presented to you. I guess it is nice, or whatever the correct term is for web designs, but I feel like I am reading some genre version of E! Online’s website.
Branden – That was my first thought, too.
Not CBR, but an incredibly lifelike simulation!
I understand that Newsrama (and Brady, et al) want to grow, but my problem is it went from being my favorite site about comic news to a site that now looks like so many others with comic books as a tab. Lame.
So far, one day in, its bugging me. I feel like I have to look for the news I want.
We’ll see if this changes…
JR
Actually, Newsarama’s new layout looks like the other Imaginova sites, all of which were around long before the CBR update. The ironic thing is that CBR’s “new” layout actually echoes the layouts of the other, pre-existing Imaginova sites.
I don’t have an opinion on the new look because I haven’t been able to get it to open. They must be tinkering with code every time I try to go there.
Ken said: “There is an awful lot of clicking now it seems, and everything is divided into sections so you have to actively search out articles rather than just having them presented to you.”
The above is precisely why I am saddened that Newsarama went from being a site I would visit 1-2 times daily (at least), to one I may only visit if someone on a site like this throws up a link to an article on Rama’s site.
I would say less page views from folks like myself would seem to be something that is not financially good for the site, but what do I know, comics, and the internet in particular, can be pretty wacky, so I bet the new site will do fine without me as a frequent guest.
It may have been a second generation site at best but it was an easy scan and everything was one click away. I’ve seen a lot of sites go with this format and I visit ALL of them less than I used to. It’s unfortunate that the three best mainstream comic news sites have all rendered themselves less user friendly (Newsarama, Silver bullets, CBR). On a positive note it’s not quite as bad as the Silver Bullets revamp.
FYI, the CBR redesign process was already underway before the Imaginova purchase of Newsarama.
Also it is not ironic.
Geez the site wasn’t that useful before but now, feh, half the page is generic entertainment coverage that barely even has to do with comics – Kung Fu Panda? Really? On to Journalista for me as my default.
Why go from one of the longest running comic specialty sites to just another of a thousand entertainment media sites? And the design is wretched. Way to take an easy, accessible site and make it confusing and overly complicated.
I’ve been a Newsarama reader from way back when in the mid-90s before I had my own pc and had to make a hike up campus to the computer lab to print out the latest edition just so I could read it on the walk back. I have stuck with them through all of their site jumping over the years, but they’ve now lost me on this latest “evolution”. I will sadly be joining the ‘Rama regulars who will now be looking for a new comics site to call home.
Now if someone could only get Tom to go 2.0.
Someday, I will discover why so many of my comments on WordPress-driven blogs just vanish…
Fans of the “old style” Newsarama home page can click on the “More Headlines” link over on the right side of the “Latest Headlines” nav box (it’s a direct link, but I wonder if including hyperlinks is triggering some kind of comment approval or something). That link has replaced the main page in my bookmarks folder, in any event, although once they get the RSS feed running, I’ll probably just use that instead (which is also how I read The Beat).
On that note, I’m a little surprised that they finally added an RSS feed, but didn’t test it to see if it worked before they released it.
Steve Fritz’s “Animated Shorts” column has been covering animation at least twice a week for Newsarama for years, now, and they have done other animation-related articles intermittently over and above Steve’s column. The Kung Fu Panda feature there is Steve’s latest, so it shouldn’t be THAT much of a surprise.
Even so, there does seem to be a distinct loss of focus, which is why I went to Newsarama in the first place — that opinion piece about, “Stop making movies based on TV shows” and the coverage of “Get Smart” seems like the kind of thing that wouldn’t ever have been on the old Newsarama. Then again, the audience for American superhero comic books is not anywhere near the size of the audience watching movies and renting DVDs, so maybe it doesn’t really matter if the superhero comic book audience abandons the site.
Last thing is that despite the similarity in appearance, I find the CBR update didn’t make things harder to get to, and was generally a step forward. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for this Newsarama update.
I don’t really have an opinion on the look but I tried to log in and it wouldn’t let me. I thought I had the wrong password so I clicked for it to send me a new one but it never showed up. Progress takes time.