The English version of Al Jazeera’s website has been sporting an attractive new look, after a redesign.

What strikes you immediately, as an outcome,  is that you cannot generally go wrong if the home page is picture heavy. This is something that I have noticed with some recent redesigns; the reliance on picture-dominated layouts seems to work out well more often than not on news sites.

And that that the Al Jazeera page is. More than text, pictures are used all over to present an overview of  site content. To the extent that text seems dwarfed by pictures all over the page. And with telling impact; I thought the pictures were really useful in drawing readers in to explore the site’s varied news content.  I haven’t seen pictures being used as much on the sites of  the TV broadcast organisations that have gone for a redesign in recent times.

That comes at a cost of course, because there isn’t enough space to feature too many story links and headlines.

The other interesting feature of the redesign  is how just two colours (apart from black and white, of course) have been used predominantly to not only enhance the visual appeal of the page but also as tool to categorise and highlight content. (The site uses more colours; but subtly).

The weak element is the page is the empty space in the middle - which could have been used more gainfully with a bit of tweaking.

The layout isn’t a complex one but definitely seems an improvement.