Well, the obvious point to make is that they both look remarkably similar. Both have gone for CSS based layouts (which, in terms of a web standards based approach, is commendable) that use the same background and three column spread. It is not surprising that the Stuff site looks like its Australian stablemates, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age, but the NZ Herald’s similarity is odd. I put it down not to industrial espionage – which would make a terrific story, but to a (more prosaic) failure of imagination…

Technical detail

Both sites homepages are on the hefty side, Stuff weighing in at 219KB and NZH a bloated 381KB. The Herald page load, at least this morning, is a shocker. You could finish your breakfast and the hard copy of the paper before this thing loaded…

Neither homepage validates, but the Stuff website fails really badly. Why would you build a site using CSS and then still include <font> tags? It is just shoddy web development. Period. Both sites are missing some <alt> tags but, given newspaper sites reliance on posting images, it comes as no shock.

Overall

The improvements to the Stuff website are both the most welcome –only because the old site was such a disgrace– and the most disappointing. Sure, not everyone cares about the quality of the markup (except those people using assistive technologies), but you would think the developers would have taken a little more professional pride in their work. What they really screwed up, however, was missing the opportunity to implement RSS feeds for the site. The Herald site offers an array of feeds and, for that reason alone is – from a user perspective, a far superior site.

Fairfax don’t offer RSS feeds on their Australian sites, so I guess it is part of their business strategy to force their readers to the site to ingest the advertising there. Smart move. Why would you want to cater for your audience when it is the advertisers that are clearly your cherished relationship? Fairfax execs have obviously yet to be won over by the whole Web 2.0 thing.

So, what do you think about the new sites?