AOL News Gets Revamp, Readers Sigh Relief

I’ll be honest. Apart from the odd link on Digg, I never visit AOL. I’m sure it’s a descent place to visit as far as Web portals go. I doubt it offers any worse an experience than Yahoo! or MSN, anyhow. Today, I ventured there once again. A Reuters piece published on ZDNet highlighted some changes at AOL News, and so I went. No particular story to read there. Just paid a visit. And, you know, it wasn’t so bad.

It was pretty good. Why? The site’s been revamped. It’s new. Whoopee.

Seriously, though. As little as I care that AOL has changed things up (I consume news mostly the very old fashioned way – via the print edition of The New York Times), I accept the change, because it’s an upgrade. Upgrades are good.

The changes at AOL News have been fairly minor. There are little touches of JavaScript here and there, but for the most part, the designers of the new site just tidied it up and gave it something of a blog-like feel. Top stories are published in the center column. There now exists a Blog Chatter feature. (Sarcasm ahead.) Also, you’ll find throughout the site a space reserved for things called “tags”. Who knows what those are. They’re nifty, though! Oh, and they promise to regularly add polls to the mix. Sure, online polling is already far too ubiquitous a practice on the Internet today, but what they hey, if everyone’s doing it, why not AOL News, too?

So, yes, overall, the upgrade is hardly newsworthy at all. And neither are Yahoo! (the site itself, not the state of its corporate structure) and MSN. And, unless I’m mistaken, AOL competes with those two. If AOL can stay in the game with this new beta, all the more power to ‘em, I say.

Too bad that the parent site of AOL News looks horrendous, though. If they could take this “beta” portal-wide, that’d be great, wouldn’t it? Oh, how it would.

Of course, I still wouldn’t care either way.

Just making sure I got that across.