Major redesign of the Financial Times website, including the FT Brussels Blog

The Financial Times has relaunched its website. As the FT is not only a UK business newspaper but also one of the leading Brussels' print media I had a look at their new design.

First of all it looks like the new design is currently only applied to the FT frontpage, meaning it doesn't affect the FT's Europe and Brussels sections.

You can see here a commented version of the new design, with explanation of all the new items: http://www.ft.com/newlook


Good:

• The new layout is much clearer and uses more white-space. This makes it less cluttered than its predecessor.
  
  
• I think the use of "Financial Times" is a better choice than the previous "ft.com" - especially as most users will now know the FT's web address.
  
  
• There is a new "most popular" section on the front page right-hand side bar.
  
  
• No more left-hand side bar. But needs to be seen how navigation is implemented on sub-pages. The "Brussels" section is at the third level (World > Europe > Brussels), so not easily accessible when arriving at the front-page.
  
  
• Overal, the new site looks far more like a blog :)
  

Bad:

• I do not necessarily think that the pink background is bad as such. But grey text on pink background is definitely not working well.
  

• While there might be technical constraints I don't think that having two (quite different) designs running at the same time is a good idea. The sub-pages should be migrated as soon as possible.
  

Interesting:

• Shorter teaser texts: The short summaries below story titles have been replaced by a sub-title with more or less equal length as the main title of the story. This will probably increase the possibility to quickly scan the front-page without having to really read whole sentences.
  
  
• The FT has copied more or less exactly the navigation bar from digg.com, a popular news sharing website. See this screenshot for comparison.
  
  

While I am writing this I see that the FT Brussels Blog has already been migrated to the new design. Have a look yourself: http://blogs.ft.com/brusselsblog/