Anything new takes a while to get use to. My initial reaction is that I like the new lettering & the more spacious look. Not keen on sites where cross scrolling is necessary though. On balance, I like it.

With the dwindling readership of the print version, how much longer will it be around? And why they don't change to a tabloid format (not content) is beyond. Get Eric Beecher into the editors chair, I say!

Seems to further blur the Fairfax stable. Was it an AGE new look or SMH??

link takes us to smh.com.au or are they the same? im a little confused.

Your link is wrong... It points to an article about ITunes in the SMH...

Seems a bit too busy to me.. but with a bit of judicous adblocking it's not too bad. A big gripe, though, is that for some reason the main pane seems to lose focus regularly, requiring a click before the mouse scroll wheel works again (Firefox). Maybe it's just me, but this is the first site I've come across where this happens.

Sorry! That's what happens when you're trying to feed three blogs! Now the link takes you to The Age.

The new look is OK, but doesn't it say a LOT that
in the flash-y slideshow explaining the new look
actual NEWS and journalism comes a poor last?
makes it quite clear what the priorities of current
management are.

My question is where did the Orange XML icon go? I seem to remember there was one right at the bottom of the page.

I know there are still links to find the RSS "channels" if you look carefully enough. But the Orange icon has become the well known indicator for an RSS type feed.

Yes, it is very much more friendly and easier to naviagate but it's about time the paper introduced RSS outside the blogs. I'm thinking, for example, Epicure in addition to news (I can't find where the feed is). I pretty much only reed feeds in Safari now and The Age is missing out where there isn't one. time to get with it.

I think it looks ok, especially with Adblock in Firefox. It is a cleaner layout, and is easier to find content.
My only gripe is that The Age SMH Cryptic Crossword now does not work in Firefox. It just renders a black box for me. It works in IE, but I'd rather avoid going there.

So far the new look seems confined to the front page. Tentatively I would say it looks slightly better but is perhaps less functional than the old one, which I thought was one of the best newspaper sites around. Why? because it followed a clear pattern of menus down either side with the key menus down the left side. Intutively it worked well not least because the pattern is common across the web. Of course this sort of functionality is the opposite of branding so I suppose its not surprising it had to go.

Both old and new are heaps better than the Murdoch sites, which are basically an ugly mess whose primary purpose is, like a porn site, to keep you thinking there is something here worth looking at and that is free when in fact little of either is the case.

The new Age site makes you scroll through more of it to find stuff, presumably making ads more efficient, and I suppose they do have to make money! For that matter the scrolling may give a better sense of the contents available and this is a good thing.

At this stage I'd give it a 6/10 but reserve the right to move that up or down as I use it more. I hope the inside pages keep the old menu structure but presume they won't.

I also think moving the classified links to the very subdued menus at the bottom and top of the page rather than prominently in the top left hand corner is very strange, this would indicate perhaps almost too little commercial concern in the redesign.

the new site...?
HORRID HORRIBLE and TOTALLY user UNFRIENDLY.
The web designers might be feeling snug and warm
but this user has a lot of issues with it. Firstly it no longer fits on the screen, so you have to start using the slidebars to see things( which is a particular PET HATE of mine) Secondly they think us users are such dimwits they need to show " Classified Jobs Cars Real Estate" NOT only at the top of the page, it is repeated down the right hand side of the page and THEN if we have not seen that, it is repeated AGAIN at the bottom of the page! sheesh.......and what happened to the Malcontent and Gettler Blogs???? these guys get the sack??.....and finally why is World news ABOVE our local Australian news???
I HATE IT! HATE IT!

The front page doesn't dynamically resize as you resize your browser. This is a huge backward step in readability.