Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Web Site Relaunches Continue!!!

First it was America, then Commonweal, lately it has been the National Catholic Reporter and PrayTellBlog

All of them have made finding what is on the website more difficult, and in general the overall appearance of the website less appealing.

For the National Catholic Reporter one has to scroll way down the page to find articles. I don't like to do that. I like to quickly size up what is there, see what I have read, pick what I want to read, and ignore the rest.

PrayTellBlog has the worst new web design of all.  As a regular reader, I would always read the articles back until where I had stopped reading the last time. How do your figure out what were the last (e.g. five) articles? If you find the way to do that, please let me know.

PrayTellBlog has made finding the comments a lot more difficult. Little respect for commenters. As someone who now gets to post and comment, I still enjoy commenting, and look forward to comments on my own posts.

I did find one redeeming feature at PrayTell. As someone who posted there about a dozen times, I checked to see if my posts were still there. Low and behold they are not only there but they are more  readable and interesting! 

I always like my post on Television, Time Use, Lent and the Divine Office
when I wrote it, but never liked it when I read the post. There is a lot of data that has to be absorbed by the reader. The new web design makes that easier. Of course it might all be easier if I could have edited my own post. The post now looks much more like my original Word document.

Maybe the new web designs generally increase readably of articles. Is this what is driving all this changing that is going on across websites? It is a lot harder to find anything, but maybe everything is more readable and enjoyable when you find something?

18 comments:

  1. Jack, I agree with you 1000000%. I'm tired of playing "hide and seek" @ the NCR site. These sites fail to pay attention to "if it ain't broke, don't 'fix' it"!

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  2. Wow - Pray Tell has really changed. NCR too. It must be a marketing thing - everyone must use the latest trend in web design to stay current and competitive.

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  3. I looked at Pray Tell yesterday and there was no clue. I don't know what the new site means.

    As for NCR, even though I still have my NCR Cafe mug from First Launch, I've always relied on the work of others to tell me when there was something to read there.

    There must be a group of consultants going around designing these things. Local evening television news was pasteurized by three "consultants" with a single goal (excitement) back in the Sixties. Today you can't tell when you turn on the TV whether you are in Topeka or Bangor. Guess we are coming to the day when you won't be able to tell whether you are on Pray Tell or Playboy.

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    1. "I've always relied on the work of others to tell me when there was something to read there." Maybe this is why it works for younger social media types. Maybe they mainly read only what other people have recommended.The research shows they spend far less time that we do in gathering the news. Maybe the only news we need to know is what our friends think is interesting

      I have friends who send me e-mails with links all the time. I sometimes send them links in response. So maybe we old folks are not really so different from the younger generation. Maybe the technology is just moving to accommodate them.

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    3. "Excitement"! Our college course management Web site has been revamped by a corps of evil instructional designers with one goal: Control.

      Our departmental brown shirts can now spy on all our course documents to ensure we have not changed any of them, and CCTV in every classroom allows them to make secret "visits" to ensure we are presenting the material dictated for that day in the approved manner.

      My job is now coordinating and grading assignments, and keeping students in task. This job could be done by a moderately bright birder collie.

      I've already signed my contract for the coming semester, but I'm done after this.

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    4. Thanks, Blanche: "I've always relied on the kindness of strangers."

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    5. Jimmy, some day we should meet and do our favorite Tennessee Williams lines. I get to be Violet Venable!

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  4. Those of us whose original background comes from reading books are trained to follow a linear order: things come in a certain order, one after the other, word by word, line by line, page by page, and we are used to relying on that to figure out, for example, "where I had stopped reading last time".

    But people whose primary reference is a two-dimensional screen are used to things being displayed all over the place and have different references. It does not seem to bother them that there is no natural order.

    On the other hand, the youth around me seem much more sensitive to the aesthetics of the displays for example. I tune out those things (background picture, banner, animations, etc.) almost completely because I am so focused on the text and on everything that is inherited from books. They, on the other hand, seem to be really bothered if the display is not quite right.

    I treat web pages as though they were books with side distractions that I try to ignore. They treat books as though they were web pages that are missing all sorts of basic features, a lack that they try to tolerate.

    What I want to know is how those young people remember things, what handles they use to organize their memory. If they could tell me that, then maybe I could organize my memory differently and retrain myself, and it would no longer bother me that those newly redesigned web pages are so "disorganized"...

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    1. "Linearity" as it was called in the world of design some years ago, has become a dirty word. The idea is that people should be able to pinpoint what they need from a search engine, and that order and "scaffolding" are not important (unless you're selling something).

      I have always been very concerned about how this might erode the ability to see connections between ideas and make logical arguments, something college freshmen (and up) have a great deal of trouble doing.

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    2. You're right! I do have students who present a collection of arguments to make a case, all given together in no particular order, instead of having a coherent reasoning in which the arguments are presented in logical order. I never thought of it!

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    3. Yeah, a young man brought a paper into the tutoring center yesterday. He had a whole bunch of random info on Muslims in America. When I asked him what the purpose of his paper was, he said, "to look up stuff about American Muslims. Help me, Jesus.

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  5. I also took a look at Praytell yesterday and my first reaction was to quickly close the window -- I thought the website had been hacked!

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    1. A great comment. I hope this gets back to Father Anthony. Rita Ferrone writes for both PrayTell and Commonweal, I hope she still checks us out often enough to pick up our comments.

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    2. My reaction was that I not only would not be tempted to comment, I would not be tempted to send in a post. If it were published I might not even find it.

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    3. I ask myself: what is the purpose of this design (at, say, P&T)? If it is to prove that the curator can find a photo for any subject, then I'd have to say the new designs prove that even a border collie can be a curator. But if the article is really a subject at some level of abstraction (such as the relative usefulness of two translations of something), even a photo of Wittgenstein detracts rather than adding to the perception of what we are looking at.

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  6. I think Claire is right - it's a generational thing. I'm not sure what the long term implications of all of this might be - many young adults don't seem to be able to think beyond 140 characters, just like our ignorant president. The attention spans seem to get shorter and shorter. Those of you who teach are fully aware of this.

    Claire: "I tune out those things (background picture, banner, animations, etc.) almost completely because I am so focused on the text and on everything that is inherited from books. They, on the other hand, seem to be really bothered if the display is not quite right.

    I treat web pages as though they were books with side distractions that I try to ignore."

    Moi aussi.

    I agree with all here about the new formats of the websites. I think they are terrible. I once worked on a website redesign, part of the team. I was a content person - writer - but all of us on the team were supposed to provide our opinions. The young woman leading the redesign was single-minded, and she eventually got her way - a splashy new website, featuring crayon box colors, as one critic put it. This particular critic said it looked like the site was designed for a party store. It did. But the website was for a Dept of Defense project! The project manager who had allowed this person to convince him of the new "look" for the site retired. The "new" site was retired also, about a month after the new project manager took over. He judged it to be "non-professional" looking (understatement), and not communicating well the mission of the DoD!

    I am not much interested in liturgy, so seldom look at the site. Now and then I do, because it sometimes amuses me. I was fascinated by a very long string of comments on a post where the writer was asking which word was best to describe the priest's role at mass - the priest "presides" at mass, "celebrates" mass, or "..."? I don't remember the third word (leads?) that had them all so upset. For non-liturgists like me, it was an argument about how many angels dance on the head of the pin. But, after reading this thread, I took a look. It's awful. Plus, it seems there are no archives now? Or did I not find them. I didn't open the menu at the top left, I will admit.

    I think these Catholic sites are trying to attract young adults, because most who read them are not young - we are not "the future". But, it's a shallow strategy, and it seems to reveal a certain desperation at the continuing lack of interest in the RCC among young adults. They might look at the site once, but unless the content tells them that the RCC is changing its focus to issues that concern them, away from pelvic issues, dropping the hard line on gay marriage, divorce and remarriage, contraception, the ban on women priests etc, it's just going to be one look and they are gone. Young people also seem to seek a real spirituality - the whole "spiritual but not religious" movement is not the hedonistic, self-centered, lazy response to organized religion that the critics in organized religion make it out to be. Until they start listening, really listening to where young people meet God in their lives, their spiritual paths, although different from that of their parents and grandparents, flashy new websites will make no difference at all. In fact, they may be amused by what they see instead of attracted.

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