Chron 2.0

The new-look Chron.com is up and running. Color me unimpressed.

Above the fold, no complaints, but below the fold ... well, there's a whole lotta nothing. In fact, on the front page there's all of 8 links to news stories within the site ... EIGHT!

Seriously ... EIGHT!!!

Yeah, I know, we're all a bit more easy with our clicks these days and having everything on page one isn't as big a necessity. But there's just little that draws a viewer into the site that I can tell.

The news page is a bit more for a quick scan of things that have gone on in the past day ... but visually rather dull. That's a lesser complaint in my book (and based on the longevity of the Drudge Report, I'd say a lesser complaint of many others). Scott Clark is blogging the site changes and basically informs me that I'm SOL on either of these pages being tweaked much.

Getting to my section-of-interest of the paper, State & Metro Houston & Texas, I've got another complaint ... too many columns. Three columns for content leads to some messiness toward the bottom of the page. Remove that "News Near You" column and add it to the bottom of an expanded listing of the links, and I think you get an easier to read page. It also wouldn't help to include another item in the 3rd column with an image to give the site a more visual feel.

As for the individual news item pages, no complaints there. The more web-friendly fonts are a nice improvement, in fact. If they can tweak the printer-friendly format to match that, even better.