AN OLD FRIEND GETS A NEW FACE

Yes, yes, of course the Guardian had its relaunch today (bring back Doonesbury, Rusbridger, then we'll talk), but so did nme.com. It's an interesting new look, in that it's set out to try and make things look cleaner but, in the process, wound up feeling slightly more cluttered than it did before. So, the news pages now have larger photos, but the actual news story has been shoved right off to the edge, which feels a little bit uncomfortable to read that easily - there's no reason why you have to follow the web design crowd, of course, but intuitively, a thinish column on the right of a page feels like it's secondary material.

The missed trick, though, is that there's no obvious RSS feed from the news pages - most of their rivals allow readers to set up their newsreader to do the legwork; we guess the commercial logic is that if you don't let people see what's in the window, they'll be forced to come through the front door to find out. Our gut instinct, though, is that people will visit much more frequently if they don't have to go out of their way to find out what's on offer.

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