The New Republic's destructive redesign

After a false start (see the end of this post), the much-needed redesign of The New Republic's website now appears to be in place.

On the whole, it's an enormous improvement. The site finally has the kind of look and interface you expect in the year 2009.

But there's a big problem. They've reformatted all their URLs to look more elegant, which is fine. But the site no longer recognizes the old format. In other words, any TNR URL that worked before the redesign was launched yesterday no longer works. All the blog posts out there that were posted before yesterday and linked to TNR pieces now have broken links.

For instance, the whole point of this post was to draw attention to this link, which now goes to a webpage that says only:

The page you are looking for may have moved

Please use the site-wide search to locate the desired content, or go back to the previous page.

Same thing happens if you try Googling for the piece. The only way I can see to find the right links is to use the site-specific search on tnr.com. Of course, that assumes you (1) are patient and proactive enough to keep clicking around to find the piece, (2) know what terms to search for, and (3) will recognize the piece in the search results. That's too many hoops to make readers jump through.

Many posts on this blog link to TNR; I'll go back and fix the links, but surely most bloggers who have linked to TNR won't go to this trouble or even realize there's a problem. The net result is that fewer people are going to read the pieces.

There's no way this was worth doing just to have snazzier new URLs.

TNR's post explaining the redesign admits that there might be some glitches early on: "we're ... sure that you'll find bugs." I'd like to think the fact that they've ruined all their old URLs is just a bug that they're going to fix. I doubt it, but we'll see.