CBSNews.com Goes From Cluttered With Information To Cluttered With Pictures

CBSNews.com is undergoing a major overhaul and redesign of its sites to make them easier to navigate, more visually compelling, faster and more focused on driving users to content.

The new home page features a rotating list of top stories on the left, next to the list of the latest and most important headlines. CBS News programs, as well as the latest videos, photo galleries and blogs, are all highlighted on the page. CBS News also plugs its program sites, including Evening News, Face the Nation, 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, and Sunday Morning, on its homepage. CBS says that the company applied technology from its sister site, CNET.com, to deliver pages from its servers to users’ screens more rapidly. Dan Farber, CNET’s editor-in-chief, oversaw the redesign.

Here’s what CBSNews.com used to look circa 2000 (left) and currently (right):

As you can see from the screenshot of the new design at the top of the post, this is a big improvement. The additional of images definitely make the site more aesthetically pleasing and easier to scroll through. But it seems that the new site is now a little too cluttered with pictures. Farber says the news site has undergone two major redesigns over the past ten years. A small percentage of random visitors to CBSNews.com will see the new look for pages on the site. CBS Says the site is still a work in progress and is undergoing changes and upgrades frequently.

This new redesign may be part of an effort to catch up to ABCnews.com and MSNBC.com (NBC’s news site). CBSNews.com only drew 3.2 million unique visitors in U.S. in April compared to 4.4 million for ABCnews.com and 30.7 million for MSNBC.com, according to ComScore.