If you’ve been wondering why (older) links to Al Jazeera English stories are depositing you on the frontpage of the site, scroll all the way down and you’ll find tell-tale indicators — specifically, the replacement of the iHorizons logo w/ that of Aljazeera IT.
AJE has, over the past two days, rolled out a new, home-brewed content management system (CMS) and left behind the back-end software that has run its daily operations since the website relaunched in November 2006 to coincide with the new international channel.
(If you clicked on that last link, you got Jaz-rolled. The real link is here.)
Fast-loading
The first change one’s likely to notice is the significantly faster load times of the site’s indexes and individual story pages.
One contributing factor to this, presumably, is the way skyscraper elements are now handled via Ajax, thus allowing the page to load in pieces rather than waiting for everything to be done.
Friendly URLs
Another high-profile changes is the new readable URLs that replace the previously unparsable ones.
So, for example:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/17B9CA05-C477-4881-AAE7-E0EE9E44985F.htm
becomes:
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2006/11/2008525121029775483.html
The sacrifice for these pretty addresses, however, is the loss of all previous deep links.
“A short-term pain for a long-term gain,” AJE website editor-in-chief Russell Merryman says. He’s banking on the new SEO-optimisation working quickly to make up lost traffic.
There are a few other noticeable changes.
Frontpage template
On the frontpage, a new template has been laid out, with the top story featuring a number of related elements, not wholly unlike the BBC’s top story.
While inside story pages, a “Share Article” button offers readers the use of various social networking tools through the AddThis service.
Readers are also now able to comment directly (see bottom) on individual stories through the Feedback form.
Unfortunately, the site hasn’t yet been optimised for Firefox, so some readers may have to bear with some clipping issues while using the browser for the time being.
Looking back at unimplemented features announced with the iHorizons partnership more than two years ago, it isn’t hard to guess why the channel’s opted to bring the CMS development in-house.