Fairfax, one of Australia and New Zealand’s largest newspaper and online media companies, and its digital division Fairfax Digital has relaunched the varying mobile versions of their popular websites, such as The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s The Age.
These relaunches are a welcome improvement to their predecessors. Which has become to feel dated, in context of other easily accessible global media brands on mobile like the NYTimes.com or The Guardian.
The news menus and articles make better use of the limited space on mobile than their predecessors, in addition to being more pleasing to the eye and easier to navigate. For instance, on the previous versions, to read an article you needed to click on a text-link of the headline. Which regularly led to accidental clicks on adjacent stories. The new version has the whole icon+headline+excerpt clickable which is a much more friendly user experience.
And whilst the mobile banner sizes on the top of menus and article pages have not changed – I imagine the intention is to add more advertising space than the current header/footer combination by taking advantage of the menu/article layouts more modular look. By modular I mean the structure is more defined into rectangles of icons/headline/text than the previous text and link only.
Reducing the size of the masthead has increased the space above the fold for leading articles from around half, to two-thirds. See compared to the previous version below.
Other sites included in the refresh include Business Day..
..Life & Style, and Travel..
..Environment, and the National Times opinion site, operating under the newspaper masthead brands instead of the NationalTimes.com.au domain.
