TheRoot.com’s New Redesign

TheRoot.com, covered before here on Black Web 2.0, rolled out their new design this week. According to managing editor Lynette Clemetson, the site’s new look and feel is designed to make it easier to find content sections, writers, and topics. The Root released a link to the new design (accompanied with a five question survey) just before Thanksgiving.

The Root’s new design uses the familiar grid layout, and simplifies the flow of information with shorter blurbs and columns of information on the front page. A huge ad block does stick out like a sore thumb (ads are not the same size, so it shifts other content down the page), and an animated spinner underneath loads the latest blog entry from one of the site’s columnists. There are also dynamic content modules for the latest five links from the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Slate Magazine.

New sections and secondary pages are introduced as well, such as Multimedia for video and image galleries (as well as a soon-to-come podcast). TheRoot brings back the site’s family tree mapping section. The Fam, an unfinished section, looks to provide a social networking aspect to the site, including user profiles and an interactive message board. There is even a new Jobs section which is powered by Careerbuilder.com.

Spacing and readability have been enhanced with this new design, but I think a better choice of typography (Arial and Times New Roman are everywhere) and maybe a unified style guide for links and section colors should have been used to help bring these new sections out and keep related sections together. My hopes are that they are using the data from the aforementioned survey to help shape and refine the look of the site for a future redesign.

What do you think? Is The Root’s new look a vast improvement over the old version?