Well Reuters has redesigned its site; a radical redesign and perhaps an innovative one as well. But if the comments on the Reuters editor-in-chief David Schlesinger’s  post on the redesign are any indication, it has not gone down well with the majority of the site’s users.

Well, the reasons are not too hard to find. The basic elements of the old site have been dismantled and the new site has fresh elements that need getting used to.  The established layout and design conventions on the old  home page have been replaced with new ones.  Navigation is now pretty heavy duty - with an emphasis on large topics hierarchy.

The most radical departure is in terms of navigation. The old navigation has been replaced by a dashboard-style drop-down navigation with four primary categories - Edition, News and markets, Sectors and industries, and Analysis and opinion.

I think, what Reuters is doing, is to orient the site even more definitively towards the business user. The seeker of specialised business information may find the new navigation particularly attuned to his or her needs but other types of users may find the going too And some of them pretty vast; take the  Sectors and industries section and the whole list of topics associated with it.

The other interesting feature about the site is it heavy bias towards personalisation. Users can follow specific topics and select and save stories and video content as well. The site also suggests story headlines based on the user’s past browsing patterns.

The front page now has lots of white space, a list of headlines and large photos, linked to in-depth stories. As some users commented, information that’s spread over a large area , mostly below the ‘fold’.

I think the redesign is meant to attract visitors of certain kinds to the site, possibly at the expense of others.  Even without a subscription, the site will now a range of rich financial information and tools, the company says. Probably, Reuters sees the future in building up a specific kind of traffic to the site. What do you think?

“This is our redesign, a year in the making. That’s a year of extensive discussions with people like you, our elite audience of business professionals, about what would make the site better and faster and easier to use for you as you drive business activity around the world,” said Mr. Schlesinger. “We want you to be able to come for a quick glance at the top headlines, or a longer deep dive into a topic that’s important to you.”