This week we got a beta version of the site up and running. It’s still a tad wonky, but it should be ready for a round of the most forgiving testers next week. (If you want in, drop me a line.)
We’ve got big plans for the site. The Daily Dot feels that media sites have been remarkably uninnovative, leaving opportunity on the table for a startup like us. This is just the 1.0 version, the minimum viable product, the foundation for the rest. But it does take a step or two down some of the paths we intend to run.
One of the things we’re working hard to get right as early as we can is the design. We want it to be clean and easy to navigate, of course, but we also want to capture what was and is good about a newspaper. We’re not wedded to the blog style of a reverse-chronological-order river of stories, for example. Chronology is relevant online, but editorial judgment is too, as are metrics-driven displays that show the collective judgment of readers.
The look and feel is high-contrast and heavy on the graphics. It hearkens back to the black-and-white bones of most newspaper designs, while providing a clean backdrop for photos and video.
At the same time, we’re looking for ways to make sure our site reflects the communities we cover. We’ve experimented with colorful flags to indicate the subject area — I’ve always liked the notion of treating a community like Reddit or Twitter or Facebook as a dateline, myself, the modern equivalent of the bit at the start of every newspaper article that announces the physical location of the report. But the fluid and borderless nature of online communities—a Reddit discussion of a YouTube video showing a scrolling series of Facebook posts about the Stanley Cup riots, for example—illustrates the challenges of that concept.
We’re also having an internal discussion about how to organize news and features. Are sections relevant anymore? The section fronts of newspaper and magazine sites is a legacy of the way print products are organized. Web-native communities like Tumblr and Twitter organize themselves through spontaneous tags. Should we hardcode specific communities on top? Or should you navigate the site by trending topics?
It’s a work in progress, and it won’t be done by the time we start inviting beta testers or anyone else for that matter. But we believe that product development must not occur in private. It should be interactive just like the site and the content itself. So we’re putting our invite list together. Let me know if you want in.