These are intensely political days, and one of the many sites I’ve been visiting regularly is Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish over at The Atlantic, which just redesigned its site.

Blecch. Well, Blecch for Daily Dish readers. Because now when I visit Andrew’s blog, I have to take the extra step of scrolling my browser to see any actual content. That’s a big step backwards when it comes to usability.

Look at that screen shot up there: All the real estate is taken up by the Atlantic logo (why so much dead space to the right of the logo?), navigation (elegant-looking, but unless your cursor is exactly where it needs to be, you’ll find yourself getting frustrated pretty quickly), a big blank area (what’s up with that; are ads on the way?),  a giant Daily Dish logo (does that really need to be 100 percent of the screen width?) plus a bunch of white space and the top of Andrew’s cartoon head.

But no actual content above the fold. Nada. Zilch. Feh.

Having been deep in the weeds on several major redesign projects, I can only hope that this is a work in progress and things will get better. I suspect, though, that there was too much focus on making the redesigned site look like the redesigned magazine and too little focus on usability fundamentals.

Takeaway for marketers: If you’re redesigning your site, you’re probably talking a lot about prioritizing elements and content. If your site is about content, make sure at least some of that content appears above the fold.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under Internet Stuff, Marketing Takeaways.