Is the New Express Beta Site a Design Fail?

The Express have unveiled their new website makeover and whilst it certainly represents a giant stride, it’s a little hard to tell whether it’s forward or back.

Teething problems are to be expected whenever you release a completely new concept, but the new site appears to miss the mark on a number of levels. Whilst some errors are forgivable others are a little more baffling and even laughable.

Take for example the image below. It’s a snapshot of one of the news sections, in this case Rugby League. The snippet of information in the main story is cut short at an arbitrary point, just as they are throughout. One headline ‘Wild disappointed he’ doesn’t appear to be finished, unless of course Wild did in fact disappoint ‘he’.

Unfortunately the errors continue with the following; a cardinal sin of website design, the spelling mistake. It’s particularly galling considering it’s for a newspaper site, but I’m guessing Richard Desmond won’t be finding too much ‘entertainmnent’ in this particular gaffe.

Overall the site is just too busy and the home page too big. I think it’s far  from being a write-off, but the designers appear to have fallen into the same trap as Yahoo by cluttering up the homepage with too much information, and, ironically too little where it’s needed.

At the moment I think it is a design fail, no two ways about it. But it’s not irreversible and for now I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, could do better would be the underlying message though.

What’s your opinion on the new Express site? Is it a monumental masterstroke or a design disaster?

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