LA Times new website design - May 2014
Beyond responsive: three mobile website design tricks becoming trends
Trendy but not always favorable in my book.
- infinite scrolling - (meh, whatever)
- cards - (I like this)
- pre-written Tweets (??)
Increasingly, I view websites with JavaScript disabled. Maybe my laptop is too old, and it cannot keep up with the growing number of piggish sites that force a web user to download too much JavaScript.
I like responsive design and HTML5 and CSS3 for displaying text content for easy reading. But except for my enhanced writing/editing interface within my code here, I'm leaning toward removing JavaScript code, especially regarding slide-in or slide-down menus.
I may also simplify the CSS. I have never become accustomed to the fixed header or nav area at the top of a website, even though that's what I use here at JotHut, ToledoTalk, and SoupMode. For my next site, MakeToledo.com, I'll use simpler HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
For the MakeToledo menu displayed on small screens, I'll use the old-fashioned, HTML select-dropdown option, which requires no JavaScript. I'll let the browser decide how to display the menu.
Anyway, back to the trendy stuff.
The Los Angeles Times has a new-look website: a responsively designed effort from the same chaps behind sites for The Verge, Hearst and Mashable.But apart from being mobile-friendly in its responsiveness, it also features a number of mobile-first design elements that we’re increasingly seeing across a number of websites.
There’s infinite scrolling – the likes of which you can find on qz.com.
There’s also a tablet-style “visual browse” mode, which works well on desktop and mobile (and presumably tablet) although on mobile it has much more of a Vox-style “card” look and feel about it.
Cards are increasingly becoming a fashionable way of displaying content online, and they work particularly well for mobile apps like Tinder and Secret as ways to quickly and easily view and share information.
For sites like Vox, they also help break up information into snackable bitesize chunks which helps explain their main articles.
Another (and perhaps the most interesting) thing is the LA Times’ “Sharelines” – pre-written Tweets readers can quickly share. These are positioned at the top of articles, as Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton points out, to a) facilitate the fact that most readers tweet/share before reading and b) “serve as bullet-pointed story highlights to draw the reader in.”
By JR
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