Related Story: ? Inside the Online Newsroom: LATimes.com

On Sept. 22, latimes.com Editorial Director Leah Gentry sprang out of bed at 5 a.m. and went straight to her home computer. Her staff had been up most of the night making final changes to the Los Angeles Times Web site's redesign, which would go live to registered users for the first time that day, and she couldn't wait to see the results.

Gentry dialed up the Web, but her ISP was down. She picked up her phone and called the office. "How does it look? How does it look?"

Still unsatisfied, she raced to the Times' new media headquarters in the Bradbury Building downtown. There, she saw live on the Web for the first time the results of nearly a year's worth of labor and more than a million dollars in investments: a radical new latimes.com site that split the screen vertically straight down the middle, with navigation and breaking news on the left, featured stories on the right. Months earlier, Gentry had thought the look so unorthodox it couldn't work, but today she was filled with pride.

"When you look at the site you can just see the blood, sweat and tears," she says.

Users waking up to the redesigned site that day and in the coming weeks would be filled with emotion, too, though not all of it the sort Gentry was feeling. Many readers would be pleased with the new look; plenty of others downright disappointed. Latimes.com's own discussion area would become a sounding board for frustrated and perplexed users, and debate on the independent Online-News industry discussion list would ignite. But all that would come later.

Rewind to the fall of 1998, when the latimes.com staff began a task all too familiar to Web site producers the world over: The Redesign. Focus groups focused. Consultants consulted. Designers designed. Section editors battled one another for top billing. As the online presence for one of America's largest newspapers, this was no small undertaking.

The 1997-designed latimes.com site was drab and outdated; Times editors and designers agreed on that. The six navigational pull-down menus at the screen's top looked clunky, and many readers simply never used them. The Java news ticker choked downloading to a painfully slow stream of bits. And while the three-column design highlighted the day's top Times print stories in the center, the site didn't give readers a strong enough sense that breaking news was also a priority.

That, Gentry says, was critical. "How do you accentuate the fact that we update every two minutes and the fact that we're the print edition of the Los Angeles Times?" she says. "If you look at the history of the design of the Web site, we've gone back and forth. It's a delicate balancing act to convey both of those." The Times would try harder this time.

Latimes.com's staff sought proposals for the redesign from a range of consultants. From a narrowed field of four, the staff chose frog, the international design agency that created the look of the Apple Macintosh computer, the Sony Trinitron television and numerous Web sites, including e-commerce site More.com. Bids for the redesign ranged from $111,000 to $650,000. Frog's bid, according to latimes.com President Carol Perruso, "came in in the middle."

Over the same period, the Times conducted polls and interviews to learn more about online news readers. Users, they found, could be divided into two main categories: news junkies, who read the paper front-to-back, prefer newspaper Web sites and demand in-depth stories; and "sound-bite" surfers, who get their online news from portals and TV news sites and rank quick-hit breaking news headlines more important than in-depth reportage.

Gentry met with Los Angeles Times Editor and Executive Vice President Michael Parks to discuss the redesign. "What Michael and I tend to agree on is that the Web site doesn't need to mirror the physical image of the print edition because it's a different set of users that have a different set of needs," Gentry says. "The breaking news is the classic example of that."

And so the Times settled on a goal: to create a Web site distinct from the print edition that highlighted both in-depth reporting and breaking news, that appealed first and foremost to serious newspaper Web site readers, but that also attracted users from the sound-bite set. Enter frog.

Near the end of March, after months of discussion and consideration, frog designers in San Francisco delivered three black-and-white front-page designs for consideration. The first offered a traditional look with a narrow left-hand navigation bar and a control panel at the screen's top. The second offered a similar look and added a pull-down navigator. The third and most distinctive design split the screen in two, putting navigation and breaking news links on the left, featured stories and photos on the right.

The latter idea shocked Times editors and designers. "The first time we saw it, it was like, 'Whoa,' " says New Media Art Director Shrikant Nasikkar.

Gentry agreed. "My teeth about fell out," she recalls. "When you see the gutter running right down the middle you say, 'No, no, no, you can't do that.' It breaks all the rules for a print page. You were taught never to divide a print page in half."

Frog knew the rules, but designers thought the split-screen best served the Times' needs. Frog Creative Director Josh Feldman pushed hard for the radical look. "We had a feel from our past experiences that that one, although more risky, would work the best," he says.

Times staffers mulled it over. "The more we looked at it, the more I realized that this was maybe the time for that," Gentry says. Editors said they liked the way the split-screen gave weight to both breaking news and in-depth stories.

Nasikkar agreed but had big concerns. "We said, it looks great, but it's going to be a nightmare to make this thing work," he recalls. Among his chief questions was whether the page would split evenly down the screen from one Web browser and screen size to the next. He came to believe it would. In early April, the Times gave the split-screen look the OK.

Back in their San Francisco offices, jazzed frog designers worked out different color schemes, graphical details, edges and textures to present to the newspaper. The Times settled on a yellow-orange and blue look. Frog designers went on to work out the details for Calendar Live, the site's entertainment section, as well as other special sections. The split-screen theme would carry through to include nearly every page.

Meanwhile, Times editors debated where various sections would be featured on the main page's left side. "The sports editor was saying, 'Leah, you fool, put sports up [higher],' " Gentry recalls. "The business editor was saying, 'Leah, you fool, put business up [higher].' "

Classifieds proved a hot topic. News Editor Richard Core was among those arguing that the classifieds link be placed low on the page, under sports and business. Gentry disagreed. "It's the second or third most used area of the site," she says.

Eventually, breaking news headlines won the top left spot, followed by a personalization link (an extensive personalization feature is still in the works), classifieds, Calendar Live, business, sports and travel. On the right side, featured stories and photos were placed over a white background.

With the look coming together, potential users were seated in front of the main page and asked a series of questions. ("Looking at this home page, how would you get to a story on Kosovo?") Fine-tuning ensued. When some users had trouble finding political news, for example, designers added a box labeled "politics."

On Sept. 22, the site was made accessible to registered users for feedback. More fine-tuning followed, and on Oct. 7, after countless late-night Thai, Chinese and Mexican dinners at the site's offices, the new look went live to the world -- or at least the roughly 3.2 million unique visitors that latimes.com claims to receive each month. A $1 million advertising campaign would drive the point home.

Reaction came fast and furious. Within weeks, 3,500 users had responded to a survey on the site, 300 users had fired off e-mail reactions, 200 had called the Times, and more than 200 had posted reactions and questions on the Web site's discussion board.

Among them was Felipe Payan, a Los Angeles reader who took one look at the site and filled out a discussion board registration form just to have his say. "As soon as I saw your new look I immediately changed my opening page from the LA TIMES to MY YAHOO," Payan wrote. "Your previous version had the look of a newspaper with everything neatly accessible [and] now I don't know where to begin...Please revert back to the old format that I once enjoyed."

Others complained about the overall feel ("too square"), the horoscope ("...one of the worst I have ever visited"), and, frequently, the text size ("so tinnnnyyyyyyy").

Despite the paucity of discussion-board praise, the majority of feedback the Times received was positive, Gentry maintains. According to Times accounts, about three-fourths of the 3,500 poll respondents liked the new design. "People who hate you will tell you so publicly," she says. "People who love you will tell you privately."

People writing publicly on the Online-News industry discussion list had mixed opinions. "The Times design is bold and brash enough to warrant attention from all of us," wrote Howard Owens, president of the RVClub. "Personally, I like the split screen format."

Eric Meyer, a journalism professor at the University of Illinois and publisher of the American Journalism Review's Web site, identified the site's main theme as indecision. "Gone is an echo of the Los Angeles Times nameplate; in its place are the spartan words latimes.com -- a 'half re-branding' that seeks to say that this is still the Los Angeles Times, sort of," he wrote.

The split-screen format eliminates "virtually any opportunity to serve as a guidepath for readers," Meyer continued, adding, "It's a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too design, with the heavy background at left arm-wrestling with the lede hed of the headline-and-summary section at right for the reader's attention."

Gentry has read the Online-News list criticism. "I think that journalism is the biggest navel-gazing industry that there is," she says. "I think listservs are a place where people like to hear themselves talk. I say that knowing full well that some people who read this and the people who did the most finger wagging are dear friends of mine, but bottom line: It's really easy to point fingers. It's harder to take chances. I will always take chances on behalf of the readers."

The Times could have delivered an online version of the print newspaper, Gentry says. Instead, the newspaper dared to break the rules to make a better site.

"For me that was one of the truly defining moments of my career as an online journalist," she says. "I've reached the point where I can let go of all of the old print-design rules. This was to me a very tangible demonstration of that clich? that the rules are different online."

Still, Gentry says she reserves the right to change her mind six months from now. "We may come back and say, 'You know what, it didn't work, we'll change it.' We'll do that only based on the same combination of factors that took us here: user feedback, a set of prioritized needs, careful discussion and research."

Says Gentry, "We don't redesign capriciously."