Considering how many years I spent building and managing the websites of the Nevada Appeal and its sister publications, I was interested to see them roll out a completely new web platform and design last week.
The look is very clean, though almost in a retro-1999 way, and they do work better on mobile devices. But they removed so much navigation that it makes it hard to find what you are looking for, and the keyword search is deathly slow, when it works at all.
But the logo at the top of the page is what grabbed my attention first, and not in a good way. Whose idea was it to color the Nevada state capitol dome red?
After all, the Silver State is famous for having a silver dome on its old capitol building. Some people even mistake it for real silver.
But red?
Just what kind of message are they trying to send with their bit of artistic license? Is this an attempt to say the State of Nevada is awash in red ink? Or, is the red hue there to suggest the Communists are moving in?
I'd like to think they are switching to red to match the colors of Carson Now, but that can't be.
Maybe they were shooting for what the world would look like through rose-colored glasses and went too heavy on the red.
The reality is our capitol dome is silver. If you are going to build a business on reporting what's happening in the real world, you shouldn't start off by changing reality.
I'd also like to mention that along with the web change came the death of three newspapers sites I had worked on for many years. The Lahontan Valley News site was rolled into the Nevada Appeal, and the sites for the Sierra Sun and North Lake Tahoe Bonanza were dumped into the Tahoe Daily Tribune.
Seems this was some kind of cost-cutting measure to go along with the new web system. But those three papers basically vanished from the online world, and they didn't even seek to keep some of their branding.
Makes me wonder how long it will be until the print versions of those papers are rolled into their bigger siblings.
Enough about this sad topic. Time to get outside an enjoy our spring weather.