April 11, 2011

Say what you will about AOL, but most of the sites in their portfolio have slick, eye-pleasing designs (examples: homepage, Comics Alliance, Joystiq, even Mapquest somehow). I just looked at the Huffington Post to see if it's been redesigned to follow suit (answer: I don't think so?) and holy cow, how does anyone manage to read this thing?? Their front page is so generic-looking and cluttered and everything clashes with everything else, and it goes on for like ten rows more than it should, and their article pages look like someone vomited a bunch of sharing widgets all over the place. Yeah, I know this isn't a real controversial opinion and that it could've been made any time between now and 2005, but aside from the occasional linked article (post? Is this behemoth considered a "blog?") I've somehow managed to avoid it over the years. Oh, also the incredibly vain name sounds like a made-up newspaper from Richard Scarry's Busytown and the attempts at shortening it (HuffPost! HuffPo!) somehow make it worse

That said, I hope AOL and Huffington Post find a way to make money from content because, if they can't, the internet is doomed