Interview: The NYTimes.com's director of product management and development talks about the Gray Lady's redesign online.The Gray Lady just got a facelift.
After years with a static and relatively unflexible layout, nytimes.com launched its redesign April 3. The new design creates thousands of new pages on the site and makes ample use of larger screen sizes, community technologies and video.
Prominent new sections include: Times Topics, which provides summaries of important issues and links to coverage; Most Popular, which displays the most blogged, searched and e-mailed stories, as well as the most popular videos; and Today's Paper, which displays the paper as it appears on news stands.
The new design not only makes it easier for readers to browse, but also ostensibly easier for advertisers to plug their wares.
"I think the most important thing was we already had an engaging site. Now it's cleaner and more effective," said Alyson Racer, vice president of advertising.
"With the embedded videos, which start on the home page, we have more opportunities in a format our advertisers like...each video has a 15-second pre-roll for advertising.
Publish.com caught up with Robert Larson, director of product management and development, to get some more insight into the thought process behind the redesign. An edited transcript is below.
Some observers on the Web, such as Six Apart's Anil Dash, said the new design looked to be inspired by blogging. Did you take any inspiration from the blogosphere?
I don't think there were specific parts of blogging that inspired it, no. There may have been some crossover of elements. Generally, with the type face, we wanted to make the site more readable by our users.
So, you guys went 1024x768. Why'd you make that decision now?
We didn't want to be necessarily the first to make this decision, and if you look around the Web you'll see various news sites have already gone this route. We wanted to make sure our advertisers were comfortable with the change. In some ways, we had already begun to use up the space on the right hand side with TimesSelect banners. So you could say we were already in transition. But the larger formats give the advertising more prominence.
So you were increasing inventory then?
I think, in just one sense, we've created a more engaging Web site that readers will spend more time on clicking through stories. We've also created many more sections than we had before...in Times Topics we've created literally thousands of pages that didn't exist before.
Let's talk about video. Is it Flash, or did you use an embedded player?
It's Flash. We partner with the Feedroom...Can I mention one other section of the site we're proud of? Most popular. One of the goals of this Web site is to promote a sense of community. One of the most popular sections has always been the most-e-mailed section. Now, we have most e-mailed, most blogged, and most searched.
That's cool. Now, I've noticed that the Washington Post includes community tools, like Technorati graphs and del.icio.us links in their articles. Any plans to implement those kind of blogging features?
We do some of the same things the Post does, we just do it different. Reporters linking to blogs is an example of that. And you know, we've started several of our own blogs.
Online Media 
