Crunchberry Project

I judge books by their covers. Similarly, I judge websites by their homepages. If you don’t impress me, I will likely leave your site within minutes. 

Research has shown I’m not alone in this. While we all judge homepages by our own set of standards, the fact remains, we judge. This is not good news for someone (me) trying to design a homepage. In fact, it’s downright terrifying. 

The obvious first option was to copy the standard norms for online news sites. Think: USAToday.com, NYTimes.com and CNN.com. There is nothing wrong with these models, to be sure, but as we are building a somewhat experimental site, we wanted to be, well, experimental. And the truth of the matter is we will likely not have enough content each day to fill an entire news site, nor the development time to build it. 

What we want from this site is a place to best showcase what we have created: the comment structures we have built and the Facebook Connect integration we have developed. One of our professors, Jeremy Gilbert, put it best. This site should be like the best art galleries – display the work without getting in the way.

We decided to pursue a news feed model. What we think is the quickest and easiest way to get readers into the stories and experimenting with our designs. Think: New York Times River (with a little more design), meets Digg (without ratings).

New York Times River on a mobile platform. dsearls/flickr

 You see, we are designing a site for the Facebook generation. These people use Digg, Reddit and Twitter. They use sites like this. They get it. They don’t necessarily need the pretty, the big photos, the fancy layout (especially for our testing purposes) they need the stories. 

So while this site might not agree with the tastes of everyone, hopefully it will help us reach our target audience, 20 to 35 year olds living in Cedar Rapids, so they will be able to test out what we have built for them.

After all, if you build it, they will come, right?

We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. Luckily, we didn’t have to. 

There are many sites out there that let users create profiles—but how many social networks and profiles can one person maintain? We decided not to do what someone else is already doing well, and instead utilize the social networking power that is Facebook, or rather, the ability to relate news to your social network using Facebook Connect.

From the Facebook developers blog: “Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features available to third party applications today on Facebook.”

This week I am busy designing a system for how comments a user makes on our site will appear on their Facebook profile. Again, not reinventing the wheel here. The Facebook developers wiki makes it pretty clear what the accepted norms are. 

The system I am designing for The Gazette Online this week is very similar to the entertainment celebrity news and gossip site, The Insider. The Insider was one of the first sites to integrate with the Facebook Connect system. Users can choose to add comments they make on The Insider to their Facebook profile wall feed in either a one line, short or full format. 

The good news is that if Facebook approves our implementation of Facebook Connect, the Gazette would likely be one of the first news sites to use the system. But that is a big IF. Facebook has said Connect will roll out November 30, but it’s anyone’s guess if they will hit that deadline, who they will approve and how it will be decided. All we can do is wait, design, develop and hope that the brains behind Facebook Connect like what they see.