First the good. I like the new weather bug, like it on the top of the page.

The bigger default font and more white space for each news story is good. Much cleaner and is not afraid to ask readers to scroll — a much better alternative to multiple page loads of three grafs each. I hate that.

These changes alone make for a more attractive style and look. Function you say?

Check out the blogs. If you can. There is no longer — that I can find — a single page which loads all paper’s blogs. The old charlotte.com link to that page now loads a 404. Earlier it was loading a defunct blog from April 2007. This link is still all over TCO site, not to mention in Google. Needs to be fixed ASAP.

But that is just a broken link, an oversight. The concept of the blog presentation is wonky as hell. The new blogs “root” pull down lumps bloggers with columnists and leaves out — what, half, two-thirds of the paper’s blogs — at any given viewing. If you didn’t know to go looking for, say, Paid to Party, don’t know how you are supposed to find it from the new page.

Blog posts trigger a “recent update” feature on the page, but not blog comments, which everyone knows can be the most compelling read on any blog, including Meck Deck. As a result, readers heading to the “main” blog page may have no clue a spirited comment session in underway on a blog they follow.

More strange are the new, larger pics of the reporters and editors who blog. Who thought this was a good idea, a good use of scarce space on the main listing of the blogs? Just bizarre. And I must have misunderstood Rick Thames when he implied the design of the paper’s blogs would be normalized. Some are still in-house, some are still blogspot. Perhaps that is still to come.

And here’s a weird one. Some pages will not load in MSIE for me at all. My heavily modded Firefox 2.0 rig mostly eats everything up, spitting out the ads and java junk, of course. Some sideshows are sticking, which is probably a good thing.

The back-end seems tightly mated to Yahoo! Overture platform, which is fairly standard for papers at this point. I never see any of the ads served up, so it doesn’t matter to me one way or another.

So save for the huge blogs snafu, I’d say that the update is a slight improvement and much better than some updates to Web sites that I’ve seen. We’ll keep poking around, however.