The Poynter Institute (“a school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalism”), which hosts a lot of important content about media, just redesigned its web site. It looks nice.
I wish they hadn’t dumped clear and obvious URL’s (http://www.poynter.org/medianews) for obscure URL’s that were clearly designed by a programmer (http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45).
But I cannot believe they broke all their links in the process. Any links to eMedia Tidbits on this site are now worthless. Any items that contain those links are a lot less useful than they were yesterday. Big chunks are missing from our conversation.
You would think that after screams of pain about the way that Knight-Ridder’s redesign damaged the Web by destroying historical links that Poynter would have known better.
Making something irretrievable is another way of destroying it.
Breaking links is also unnecessary in most modern serving environments.
In Apache, for example, a clever scripter can use mod_rewrite to reattach old-format URLs to a new site’s addressing scheme. IIS, which may be the Poynter platform of choice (I’m guessing because of the obvious use of Active Server Pages), also has methods to create permalink (and search engine) friendly URLs.
Maybe it’s just my browser, but I find much of the text a bit harder to read, too.
We did redirects for most popular pages, e.g. http://www.poynter.org/medianews, but will do our best to address the issues you raise asap. Thanks to you and Jay for the suggestions. Stay tuned…
— Bill Mitchell/Poynter