Economist.com rolls out new design

The Economist magazine unveiled a new design for its Web site that is cleaner and easier to find stories.

An announcement on the site stated, “We have removed long lists of articles and replaced them with a pithier selection. The navigation that runs down the left-hand side of the page, and throughout the site, is now completely visible right away, with no need to scroll down ‘below the fold’. By rolling your cursor over the main categories of content you can reveal more detailed sub-categories.

“A second aim was to make more content readily accessibleâ€”strange as it may sound, to combine greater simplicity with greater depth. At the top, four main items of content rotate before settling on the lead story. You can readily scroll through all the columns. There is more breathing room for our blogs. Articles from the print edition are easy to find via the cover image.

“A new feature brings to the fore the articles that have proved most popular with readers. You can choose between three different measures of this: the articles that have attracted the most comments, the ones that readers have recommended the most (by clicking on the ‘recommend’ button next to the text) and those that have been most read. So you get to influence what appears on the home-page.”