The Daily Nation yesterday at an exclusive bloggers event launched the revamped website that was to be version 4 of their site since they went digital. The new site went live as of today morning. The website is characterized by ten homepages that deliver content in different ways, in the words of Linus Gitahi, the group CEO, this is to give the reader a better way to consume content.
Some of the homepages had content the new blog look for the “digital natives” and a second homepage for the “digital immigrants” that looked similar to a newspaper.
Other homepages included a news alerts page with short timely alerts, specials for long reads on another, video portals, bloggers and thought leaders homepage and also Life and Style homepage.
This is quite good, although some feel there is too much information overload on the site and quite many banners. Oh, and they removed the annoying pagination.
The story is different when you go to the site mobile first. I happen to own several devices, and a 5 inch Galaxy S 4 is my primary device that I happened to access the site with. First, the mobile site is nowhere to be seen on first load, so browser and screen size detection is limited to website resizing. This is not favoured by the CSS that loads a mess of a website. Menu items and search bar are floating all over with other parts of the site also displaced and overlapping to create a nice mixed grill.
It’s not until you scroll down to the bottom that you see a button that you can tap to load the mobile site, and things go back to sanity. I tried the same with another browser, the story was the same, that is Chrome browser and the default Android Browser. The situation replicates on the tablet, my tablet is an 8 inch Galaxy Note and there was still some level of CSS hitches, though not as bad as on the smartphone.
I haven’t used a smaller screen size to see what one experiences, but if any of you has you can share your experience in the comments section.
These are things that can be corrected, the change was good, but clearly needed some more quality testing before going live.
