I worked with the team that originally designed STLToday. The idea was to have a news site with a magazine layout: white space, uncluttered copy, limited use of banners ads, easy look at, and style. The Managing Director, who is no longer there, had a cutting-edge vision for a news web site.

When the site launched in 2000 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper, the owner, also had their news site running, postnet.com, but STLToday aggregated news from several sources – no easy task – and was intended to be different from the newspaper’s site.

Almost immediately the vision began to fade.

Within the first month all Flash was removed from the site. At that time the Macromedia Flash player has 92% market penetration and the few people that complained got their way. Luckily, we were able to replace the Flash elements with DHTML and kept the design intact.

The site lost money because of its policy not to have a lot of ads. They pursued sponsors for sections and tastefully displayed that affiliation, but it wasn’t profitable. The visionary Director was replaced and the site’s metamorphosis hastened.

Slowly, the new Creative Director began to change the look and in a few months the site did not resemble its original self; bevels, drop shadows and bad graphics invaded the tasteful layout. About that time the newspaper closed its site and decided STLToday would stand for all. Here came banner ads, a lot of banners. They also began to employ Flash overlay ads – those are sexy. White space was no more and clutter, compressed clutter, dominated the design.

Last year the site was completely redesigned. A hard-to-look-at red and 3D Photoshop effects prevailed. This design was ridiculous. People must have complained. (As of 6/14/2006 the homepage is this design.)

St. Louis’ number one web site, according to the STLToday, has a new look, or as of today, 6/14/2006, part of a new look.

The new design, shown on the main news and other sections, keeps the red, but it’s toned down a bit. The ads are still everywhere, but there’s more white space and they have widened the layout for 1024px wide screens. I bet they’ll hear about that. Gone are the Photoshop effects – must be a new Creative Director. This is a move in the right direction, but I wouldn’t call the design good, but it is much easier to look at. Hopefully they’ll continue to improve it and get rid of that red altogether.

I’d like to see STLToday be successful and look good, but they have a lot of work ahead. One of their biggest problems is their owner. Another is they run the site on an IBM Lotus Notes system and Domino server. This is not the easiest animal to tame. They would be better served with a different technology. There’s also the whole Web Standards thing. This is a perfect case for Web Standards. Just think of the flexibility they’ll have, less bandwidth use and improved accessibility.

I wish they would have left it as it was originally. Maybe it wasn’t perfect, but it was much better than anything they’ve had since.