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NYTimes.com Hand-Codes HTML & CSS
eldavojohn writes "The design director of NYTimes.com, Khoi Vinh, recently answered readers' questions in the Times's occasional feature 'Ask the Times.' He was asked how the Web site looks so consistently nice and polished no matter which browser or resolution is used to access it. His answer begins: 'It's our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to "hand code" everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.'"
A lot of newspapers, including the NYT, realized early on that they had to move onto the web in order to retain their readers. But despite this early insight, and 10+ years struggling to get viewers to come to their sites, none of them have figured out how to do a proper news web site. Not one.
Absurdities like use of hand-coded HTML and CSS are just the tip of the iceberg. What really bothers me is that nobody seems to have thought of a way, or even tried to think of a way, to properly use the Inverted Pyramid on a web site.
The Inverted Pyramid, for those of you who didn't take Journalism (I took it in high school) is a stylistic technique where you put the most important and newsworthy details of a story in the first paragraph. Slight less important stuff goes in the next paragraph, and the next, until you trail away with trivia at the end. That makes it easier for your editor to trim a story so it fits in the available space. More importantly (especially for an online newspaper, where space is not finite), it makes it easier for the reader to graze the news. You can be your own editor, on stop reading a story when the details are too fine to attract your interest.
You'd think that this would actually be easier to support online than in a physical newspaper. But news sites don't even try. They just dump the print edition online, then provide link farms for the stories, with a few stories getting special summaries.
And they're been similarly stupid with their classified ads. These used to make up something like a third of their income, before Craigslist stole all their customers. Now, you might think that there's no hope of competing with Craigslist, since most of its advertisers get a free ride. But classified ads aren't all that expensive, and advertisers wouldn't have stopped using them if Craigslist didn't do a better job of connected the right advertisers with the right customers.
The print classifieds were doomed in any case, but newspapers were ideally set up to turn their print classifieds business into an even more lucrative online classifieds business. But, as with so many other things, they never really tried.
Probably most of you don't care — you get your news from blogs. Me, I prefer to get my news from somebody who knows something about finding stuff out, who has some sense of professional ethics, and who doesn't simply regurgitate every rumor that sounds vaguely plausible. Unfortunately, that option is rapidly disappearing.
I agree, provided you use a language that doesn't make my eyes bleed. Die, PHP, die.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!