I find mountainx.com confusing, with its colors/words/items everywhere. For some of us, less is more and clarity and simplicity rule the day.
The page is cluttered with topics and colors. For young and old with ADD/ADHD or with vision-perceptual difficulties such as figure-ground issues or spatial relationships, finding a topic would be almost impossible. While I have none of those concerns, I find Web pages with simple, clean, informative links are most helpful. Another case of less is more!
— Sandra Kremer
Hendersonville
Xpress Web manager responds: One of the challenges with our website is displaying the massive amount of content we produce and aggregate in a way that is easy for our readers to consume. We have a number of enhancements planned for 2012 that address your concerns.
I’ll agree with Sandra. Every little packet of information on the front page is another item that has to load. We have twitter and blogwire feeds along with the main articles, ads and links to other sections of Xpress. You removed the comment feed, the one shortcut I found remotely useful. Now Facebook loads with everything, along with every other sharing widget, user score button and things I probably ignore.
It’s too much! You can’t connect to and satisfy every platform on the web. Pick a few and be done with it. At the very least make the twitter crap a link to the feed for people who can decipher that nonsense and keep that off the front page. Make the blogwire a shorter feed. Put the comments back if you really want to use this site for community dialog.
Rant complete.
Yeah, I have to agree (and have submitted suggestions). Thank goodness it is still possible to select the ‘Old MX’ (and even that seems to take forever to load). It’s just confusing and type gets overlaid on other type, etc. A mess.
And amen about the Twitter and blog fees.
I think the huge drop in discussions is all the proof you need.
Maybe everyone else finally realized that you & I say it better than they ever could, Orbit, and they’re staying mum to avoid embarrassing themselves.
the segregated facebork comments are lame.
Bothwell, an experienced journalist, is right about the new design. Cluttered and reader-unfriendly. Even The Gap and Coca-Cola moved quickly when they introduced new designs that didn’t work. Mountainx is waiting too long to get back to basics.
What’s up anyway? It seems the MtnXpress is in a race with the AC-T to choke off reader comments. Based upon the number of posts over the last couple of weeks, it appears the MX is winning.
How disappointing.
I am not as bothered by the aesthetics as I am by the comments process. The old website posted your comments quickly and accurately, there were email notifications, so you could follow a dialog without having to check every day, and you could post jpegs directly into your comments. All that is over. The only new feature is a separate ‘reply’ box, so it’s clear what you are replying to, but given that there are no ‘notifications’ to let people know that you may have replied to something upthread, this is not an improvement.