Puffbox

There’s a new-look website over at The Mirror too… and this one’s even more bonkers than the new Times site. Load up the homepage, and on my Firefox setup anyway, two video streams fire off at once. Hey guys, by all means take inspiration from the success of MySpace… but not this! (Doesn’t seem to affect IE, though.) And that’s before we mention the fact that the first video content you see is American… and way out of date. A Superbowl preview, chaps? Er, that went out of date at 11pm on Sunday night. Not exactly ‘up to the minute’, as the editor claims.

In their defence, there are RSS feeds a-plenty, Digg and del.icio.us buttons, a load of blogs (powered by irBlog, the same engine as at the Telegraph), and – apparently – the full Daily Mirror archive ‘going back 103 years’, although I didn’t see it anywhere in the navigation. But I’m afraid it still feels very, very rough round the edges – just like the old Mirror site. A LOT OF CAPITAL LETTERS, and no real sense of (true) design.

How they justify their claim to be ‘the best newspaper on the web’ is simply beyond me. It looks like a site which is desperately trying to copy bits from each of its various competitors, without really knowing why. And none of it successfully.