For the record ...

... the new Pipe Dream Web site looks awesome. It's much cleaner, much more visually appealing, and would make people want to keep coming back. It looks great. I especially like the ESPN-like graphical interface out front, and I'm glad they brought back the .pdf's of the covers.

However -- the functionality of it seems to be up in the air. I hope the web guys over there didn't dig themselves in too deep with the non-working widget on the right side of every story. The photos linked to stories seem to be shoehorned into the little rectangle. The big "media" thing on the front doesn't seem to do anything; I'm on Firefox, maybe it's different on IE.

And I think the aforementioned big interface is perhaps the biggest worry. The site can work great if you put sufficient manpower into it, but expecting, say, a photo editor to have to configure all of those interfaces for each issue will inevitably become overwhelming.

Of course, I wish them best of luck. It's great to see the paper looking to get better, and although I don't read the other sections as much as I probably should, Mark Macyk and his sports gang are doing a bang-up job. I'm especially looking forward to whatever he has planned for the tournament.