Sun Media Launches Bold Redesign of News Websites

Toronto Sun RedesignSun Publications has launched a bold new redesign of their newspaper websites in Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary. The sites were launched this week and designed by the UX and Creative team at Qubecor Media owned Nurun.

The default view for the new home page features a large eye-catching photo in the top banner. The top news stories are presented in a vertical mosaic of photos that are easy to scan as you scroll. Each image features a link to a ‘Quick View’ option of the story showing a picture, headline and a few paragraphs of the story in a popup view that can be closed without leaving the home page underneath. The number of comments made on a story is also viewable on the image, as is the link to go to the full story.

The home page can actually be viewed in two ways, as the mosaic view or as a list featuring a headline and thumbnail. The list view can be further filtered by news section.

The photo mosaic design is repeated on the home pages of each news section with the subsections presented in well separated groupings of featured stories.

The main navigation features a large dropdown of secondary navigation areas as well as hot topics, featured and latest stories. This combined with the mosaic view allows the majority of top news stories across all news sections to be a single click away.

I find the site very easy to navigate, and the ability to visually scan the top stories is the great product of the redesign.

What are your thoughts on the redesign?