It’s hard not to like a site design that seems un-tethered from the banner ad business model.

It is clean and attractive – it borrows many design cues that you see on othere sites like NYT.com – but is scaled for human consumption (Unlike the NYT’s home pages which is likely designed with the googlebot cipher in mind afore the human reader.)

It seems not to have a strong community engagement section – and that leads me to a few other things I noticed once you get past how clean the template code is.

They absolutely missed a great many things in their multimedia behaviors.

For example:

1) Not letting their audience embed and (and thus virally distribute and amplify) their unique assets. (Crikey, even the WSJ allows embeds . . .

2) Not displaying the vital dynamic feedback (a.k.a displaying the number of views and other meta data in real-time. this is the pixie dust that makes a site feel alive. (i.e Tell me how many other people are reading? or have read this item?, How many registered users are online?, etc)

3) The designers assumes that that people prefer their web video windows to dominate their screen. I don’t know if this is arrogance or ignorance but there is no button I could find to shrink the vids.

4) They do not allowing visitors to rank or rate the media or stories.

In spite of all the success of You Tube – the developers have crippled critical behaviors that drive interactivity and a satisfying user experience. If you look closely the embed icon is there as an option – it is just switched off!)

Look, All this to say that the new paradigm and promise of networked journalism presumes that that the user is in charge of the experience.

Wile there is some nice eye candy and clean code, the LV Sun Web site continues down the path well-trod by ‘old think’ editors – editors who still think they are in control and presume that people experience Web video like they do broadcast video. I know – a bit harsh, but these are but a few of the fundamentals no news site can ignore when it ‘redesigns.’ Users will care more about how it works than how it looks.

You Tube, Digg, and The Guardian have all changed the game. This redux seems to ignore audience expectations at their own peril.

The good news is that you can now go back and code in all that stuff and then site will rock – on more than one level.

The version of Ellington Scripps uses was built on Django version 0.91 or something like that. It’s definitely pre-magic removal.

Most folks in the Django community build apps from trunk. I do this currently.

Oh and your idea about holding comments from anonymous users is completely doable in Ellington.

Oh, and I am completely enamored with the idea of basic user profile pages for news site commenters. I think it solves about 2/3 of concerns about nastiness in open threads.

Want to make sure anonymous comments of value still get posted? Set up a feature where anonymous comments are held for moderation, but comments from logged in users aren’t.

The stock version of Ellington compiles all comments made by a user into a view for that users’ public profile.

Unfortunately, upgrading Ellington may not be as easy as plug-and-play — many of the apps made by folks are not based on the version of Django Ellington uses. This makes them incompatible.

Hopefully, the folks in Las Vegas have programmers that can extend what their version of Ellington can do.

But I’d argue against making it a del.icio.us or facebook — it’s that what those apps are for?

Any insights?