Did you see Rediff’s new Homepage? If you have not, here is a look at it…
So which site does it remind you of? Yeah, each one of you are right…
Rediff’s new design looks near replica of Pinterest and it is really sad that a company like Rediff decided to completely copy Pinterest.
I am not at all going into advantages and disadvantages of this design – my biggest disappointment is how they have blatantly copied without giving much thought.
Much more is expected out of them…
Yes, the “tiled” style of look is the latest rage, and from consumer’s perspective, it is good as well. But, Rediff could have easily incorporated a little different styling even in basic tiled design framework.
Now that my disappointment is out of way, let us discuss a little bit of design itself.
The Rediff homepage had incorporated the tiled structure and so are the sub-pages, so if you go into a any of the various category tiles, you will get a tiled page of all latest stories for that category. So lets say you click on “Cricket”, you will get a page like this.
From reader’s point of view, the design is definite improvement over previous barebones design. In a single view a reader is able to see lot more categories and recent stories than what was visible previously. So, it is more likely that reader will be led to his own interest areas in lesser clicks.
The single article view remains the same, most of which are picture stories that I hate. Simple reason being there is hardly any content. They generally consist of large image with 2-3 lines of content which are paginated in 10 –12 pages. What this does is, for a reader to complete a story, he has to click multiple times (a way of increasing pageviews from publishers point of view).
For articles that are not picture stories, readers are forced with so many ads, that the entire story is nearly invisible. Look at the screenshot below.
As you can see, on a single story about there are 5 or more ads that a visitor sees, completely screwing (yes, that’s the word) up the experience of a reader.
Yes, Rediff has been witnessing big losses over past few quarters, but this is absolutely not the way they will be able to increase their profits. If anything, they will only loose out on more readers!
Overall, I am extremely disappointed with Rediff’s new redesign. Would love to know what are your thoughts on this!