Personally, I think their new design is a helluva lot better than their old one. I’m glad they replaced the front page story rotation Flash and replaced it with DHTML, and it appears their RSS feed actually includes all the stories now. However, all the KTVZ.com stories I’ve linked to are now dead. Unfortunately it appears that all links to their old site went dead because of the new CMS. I personally think this is more of a big deal than most people believe, and did express that to Barney when he was talking to me about the new site last week. The 404 error page is mostly worthless, too, as it doesn’t include anything remotely useful to help folks get back to the front page now that every link to a non-front page from prior to today is now dead. When a CMS is changed on a major content site, I know not all URLs can be saved, but the 404 page should at least be useful to find the new site or old content. That’s probably my biggest gripe, as I typically use Google to find past news content usually linked to from blogs and such, and now I won’t be able to find anything on KTVZ.com without using their search engine. And since their search engine doesn’t include past stories (at least right now), then what happens? A good 404 with built-in search could help alleviate this problem.
Otherwise, the site is much faster loading and a much cleaner design. It doesn’t have a favicon in place like the last one did, and it could use some code tweaks here and there, but otherwise much better than before.
Their mobile URL doesn’t appear to work anymore (again, lack of useful 404), and mobile.ktvz.com is…well … weird. It looks like a default subdomain setup for the company’s clients, not something personalized for KTVZ. I did like their simple mobile news site for news updates on the go, so hopefully something useful will be implemented in the future.
What do you think? Likes, dislikes, gripes, etc…?