The online magazine's first redesign in five years puts content before presentation and prioritizes blogs and video.Venerable arts and politics Web magazine Salon.com neared its tenth anniversary this year with a big problem—the site hadn't been redesigned in five years. Web readers worship innovation like a cult, and that kind of lapse can get a publication excommunicated.
So last week Salon.com redeemed itself with an under-publicized and deceptively simple redesign.
Besides revealing a brand-new aesthetic, the redesign will also reveal a brand-new feature this week: an official video blog. With the video blog, Salon hopes to tap what many experts see as the future of the Internet.
Video blogs bring the quick-posting style of bloggers to digital broadcast journalism, allowing suppressed newscasters and documentary directors to post video content on blogs.
Video blogs have increased with the rise of cheap editing tools and powerful Internet connections, as Howard I. Finberg, director of interactive learning at the Poynter Institute for Media, noted in an article on the Poynter Institute Web site.
Sites like Freevlog.org teach aspiring video bloggers how to handle the new technology, and new search engines like BlinkxTV are developing ways to comb through video content.
"The [video] content needs to be compelling and the production value has to be top notch," cautioned Mac Slocum, a Web consultant and founder of the blog collective, Fodder Network.
"If these two things aren't satisfied, then it doesn't matter how innovative the idea may be. People simply won't stick around."
Salon.com's homepage now leads with current stories about arts, politics, or news, all displayed with uniform simplicity. Archived articles are stored in reverse chronological order below, akin to most blog's archive style, and they're bordered by thin ad columns.
"We didn't try to cram every inch full of either stories or advertising," said Salon.com editor Joan Walsh in an e-mail interview with Publish.com. "To me that symbolizes our commitment to giving you time to think and wonder and dream."
While such Web face-lifts are helpful, publishing and design authorities stressed that cosmetics are only the beginning—publications must constantly evolve to survive in the finicky world of online journalism.
The Poynter Institute's Finberg commended the redesign, but also cautioned Web publishers to be more vigilant.
"There are no silver bullets, no magic element to help a site stay competitive," he stressed. "You have to keep doing this over and over again. There can't be any rest for the successful site."
Initially, the redesign's timing bothered some readers.
Daniel Burka, a designer at the Silver Orange Web development firm, complained about the "seemingly haphazard" way that these redesigned portions of the Salon.com were introduced this summer.
"The switch from one design to the other was often jarring and confusing," he explained.
Despite his reservations, Burka appreciated the "simplicity and functionality" of the completed redesign.
"I hardly think about the graphical part of the design and instead focus on reading the news," he said.
Web 2 dot what? Click here to read more.
According to Walsh, Salon.com maintained the familiar ad ratio and access policies for readers on the redesigned site.
The magazine still features a "Site Pass" function that allows un-subscribed readers to access content after viewing an elaborate pop-up ad.
While some bloggers gripe about this advertising impediment, media analyst Jay Rosen thought the feature was key to Salon.com's survival—allowing bloggers to comment on articles while still generating ad revenues.
"They don't have the Washington Post's millions or Microsoft's billions," said Rosen, who maintains the popular media blog, Press Think.
"They had to find some model that allowed them to exist. I think they were pretty inventive, from a blogger's point of view."
According to the 2004 Third Quarter report from Salon.com, 15,400 new subscribers joined last year and net profits increased by 69 percent, or $0.4 million.
The "Salon Audience Profile" from Summer 2004 counted 3.2 million unique visitors, but only 73,700 of those viewers are subscribers.
The redesign also works to integrate bloggers into the site more fully, attempting to put Salon.com in the middle of the web conversation.
"Salon's staff seems to usually 'get' weblogs," said Burka. "They don't sound ignorant when discussing blogging news."
A prominent new "Blog Box" features Salon.com blogs such as the War Room and the Daou Report, and the redesigned site utilizes the blog index Technorati to index independent blogs that comment on Salon.com articles.
Web Design 
