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The Politico’s Design Woes

by Patrick Ruffini :: June 25th, 2007 4:27 pm

Ben Smith notes that his blog on the Politico has been redesigned. And he’s right, it’s a step in the right direction.

But the design of the Politico overall leaves much to be desired. It’s clear that most of the user interface was put in place by programmers, not designers. Note the awkwardly sized fonts and the use of unstyled bullet elements in related story lists. (Aside: Who uses Trebuchet on a serious news site anymore??) Every blog post features a lot of white space between the content and the post footer. That happens in a lot of homegrown blogging tools that rely on Microsoft Word-like HTML editors that automatically insert paragraph breaks after each save.

Politico.com would have been in a lot better by choosing Wordpress or Movable Type for its blogging engine. Check out the Fred File blog that the Bivings Group built for the Thompson campaign. It resides on a different server than the main website. Sites like the Huffington Post are also showing how you can create beautiful, precisely styled news content with an engine like Movable Type, which has seen better days. These open source tools give you the best of both worlds: complete control over layout with a bevy of pre-existing templates and plugins that can prevent you from having to reinvent the wheel. Another downside to a custom solution: Politico comments are rife with spam. If they had the benefit of Akismet, this wouldn’t be nearly the problem that it is. Also: it’s a pain to make trackbacks work with a custom platform.

Why then do big sites like the Politico go with their own tools? Not for trivial reasons. First and foremost, they are primarily a news site, while tools like Wordpress are geared towards blogging. It’s possible to use Wordpress for a news site, but a major pain to integrate, particularly if you’ve got both blogs and news going on at the same time. If you really want to get the benefit of Wordpress — the best blogging engine out there — you’ll probably have to keep it walled off from your main content management system (CMS), as the New York Times apparently does with its Caucus blog.

But IT types don’t just try to keep things under one roof for posterity’s sake. The main reason they do it is user authentication. It’s very difficult to build a single user login/profile system that works across all the different platforms you’ve got going on your site, be it blogging, news rating/commenting, social networking, action tools, etcetera. The off-the-shelf tools that are out there are getting more and more powerful, so it increasingly makes sense to use them, but the challenge of getting them to play nicely together isn’t going away. Enter OpenID, which is trying to build a standard for user login & authentication across the Internet. Will OpenID be the death of custom code, at least for small CMS-like projects? What are the prospects for Wordpress to adopt OpenID as part of its core distribution?

For the Politico, I still say that hosting the Smith & Martin blogs on a Wordpress platform is still a good idea, particularly if they can unify login access right across all their blog properties. It helps them be good blogging citizens, with trackbacks that work and spam-free comments. And with plenty of themes to choose from as a basis for the design, the presentation will finally match the quality of the content.

Tagged: cms design open source politico wordpress

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