Gadgetopia

CNN.com: CNN released their re-design today. Lots of rounded corners, and very Web 2.0-ish. They designed for a minimum width of about 1,000 pixels.

Very CSS-compliant. I shut off stylesheets and it turned into clean, readable HTML. They’re finally building Web sites like the rest of us.

In the end, however, I’m not a big fan of it, just because there are less stories linked from the front page. I tend to scan in a hurry, so I want to see as many headlines as I can. They’ve gone from three headlines in each section down to two. (And they used to have five or six before a redesign about four years ago.)

Conversely, USAToday redesigned last year, and they drastically increased the number of headlines from the front page.

For the record, CNN has been my home page since I got online in 1995. Why? Because the only other guy I knew who was online back then — my buddy Rob — mentioned once in passing that he used it as his home page. It seemed so very intellectual and worldly, which is what I thought I was when I got on the Internet for the first time, so it stuck.