The Best Website Ever
Okay, so I know that most of my posts tend to lean a little toward me hating whatever it is I’m writing about. But you’re in for a treat today, because this past week, I found (via a link from the unbeatable Kaliber10000) the International Herald Tribune, which just happens to be the best website ever, news or otherwise. It has the perfect balance between the elusive ‘compelling content’ and out-of-your-way-but-really-damn-cool interface.
First of all, it looks as if the right designer (or team) was given total control over the interface and functionality. You can even hide the banner ad at the top with a little ‘x’ right next to it. The whole site is done with DHTML layers and Javascript, so it isn’t exactly the fastest loading site in the world, especially for modem-users, but I trust it’s much quicker than a Flash site would be with the same quantity of info. Browse by region or section, or you can browse all the clippings of the articles, and make your own list of articles to read. When you click the little icon next to the clipping, it ‘moves’ to the top bar, and the number next to the ‘clippings’ menu item changes to reflect the number of clippings you have. But I digress. I can’t really go into a full feature list here, just see it and click all the cool little buttons. You can even change the weather listings from Celsius to Farenheit and back if you wish. It’s awesome.
So check it out.
But you knew I would have something to bitch about, right? This has nothing to do with the IHT, but more with my ISP, Earthlink. And not really Earthlink, but the ‘My StartPage’ service in particular. This week (right about the time I discovered the IHT site) Earthlink decided that, despite the fact that I already have DSL through them, they needed to add a little Flash movie to my startpage, letting me know how great it is. It has music. So if any of you have used a personalized startpage, you know that there’s a lot of clicking on news stories, then clicking ‘back’ to get back to the startpage again, right? Well the geniuses over at Earthlink didn’t do the Flash correctly, and so every time I hit ‘back’ from a news story, the animation and shitty music start up all over again, letting me know how great the DSL I already have is. So I’ve stopped using it. If you know of another decent startpage service,let me know.