Mark Porter

A new Wall Street Journal site launched today.

It’s been a long time in the gestation (work started long before the Murdoch takeover) though not quite as long as guardian.co.uk.

Salient points:

• New charcoal/beige colour scheme (all very grown-up and just right for the title) and cool/clean typography. For once, the Georgia font recalls the print WSJ’s scotch headlines very nicely

• The “newsreel”: a trails widget which sits at the top of the page, and which you can export to your netvibes, blog, facebook etc.

• Triple-decker nav bar (well quadruple if you count the tabs to other parts of the group above the header) replaces old-skool left-hand nav. We did everything we could to avoid the “club sandwich” at guardian.co.uk because its just so complex, but the design here does all it can to make it look usable

• Article pages with main text, comments and other media on separate tabs. This is something we toyed with a couple of years ago, but it user-tested very badly (most people just didn’t get it). Ive been liking it on cnn.com though, so it may be time to reappraise it

• Slideshows video & graphics appear to be nicely integrated on the article tabs and in some section fronts (like here) and feel like they belong. Video can also be emebedded in article text in a very small window

Theres also a new BlackBerry reader, more emphasis on video, more community, and generally more of what you’d expect a relaunched newspaper site to do

I haven’t had time to dive in and really dig around yet, but its looking pretty good to me. Its not without its flaws but the less-successful bits are the things we all struggle with; I’d say that on first view, they seem to have made a pretty good fist of it. Well done Laura!

By the way, there’s a flash tour here