14 DAY TRIAL // Websites evolve, it's a fact of life, they all need to be constantly refreshed as things move pretty fast online. Every time one major site decides to roll out a new feature or design, you can be sure there's a number of people who are going to hate it, almost instinctively. And you can also be sure that they'll be the ones screaming the loudest. A Google News revamp currently in testing isn't any different.
The Google news hub has been running a test redesign for at least a week now and there have been reports of it in the wild. This is something Google does regularly to try out fresh features or designs to help the developers tweak them and make them ready for mainstream use. The folks over at SEO Rountable have managed to get a hold of a screenshot of the upcoming design and it looks like quite a revamp.
The new page looks somewhat cleaner, not that it was cluttered before, and a bit more stylish, though the differences are subtle, exactly what you'd expect from Google. The layout is getting a pretty radical switch-around with a clearer focus on real-time and local content.
The left sidebar is slightly changed and the top stories are still the center of the attention but everything else doesn't look that familiar. The third column is now smaller, making more of a sidebar. The most recent stories are featured at the very top of the column followed by the local news search box, which is currently further down the page. Below that, the user can add their custom sections.
All of these components are already available in Google News now, yet the redesign still manages to get people vehemently against it. The reactions on the Google News homepage redesign experiment help page are not pretty as the overall sentiment is very much against it. "Horrible, if it doesn't revert to something similar as before will leave to another news source," one commenter notes. "The new layout just gives me lots of junk stories. I want MY sections, not yours. Change it back to the way it was. Better yet, get rid of your Top Stories. I want only MY stories," says another. Still, you'd expect the ones who don't like the design to be those speaking out about it and Google is definitely listening, so we'll have to wait and see what lessons it learns from this and what will make the final redesign and what won't.
