Let me start off with a small rant.

With each redesign the VRT NWS website seems to be more about just looking good instead of about the actual content. Ever increasing article blocks and whitespace. It’s like their designers all work on 13″ macbooks or ipads.

Their latest rendition made it so bad that my 27″ 1440p monitor could only [show a single article](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FYA-NIFXgAATAuw?format=jpg&name=4096×4096).

To improve my own experience I started fiddling with some custom css and javascript but figured I wasn’t the only one who doesn’t like these mobile style designs on big desktop screens.

So I created a very small chrome extension that can be [found on the store](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vrt-nws-design-customizer/hbfhdenofaljgenohlnbmdggnoiomjae). For free obviously. It just resizes the article blocks and reconfigures the columns to fill the entire viewport.

The source can be [found on github](https://github.com/ctrl-f5/vrt-design-extension). If you have issues or want to make an improvement, feel free to contribute.

13 comments

  1. Can you make it a tampermonkey script so it works with any browser?

    I mean, you published a Chrome-only extension for 34 lines of CSS

  2. Cool! Thanks for making this.

    I’m kinda torn on using this as I would still show up in the statistics as someone that is using the site (they don’t know if you use the extension).

    I want to send them a message that this was a horrible decision. If the user numbers stay the same, management might see it as: “the redesign worked”.

    (I know this is a silly and futile crusade)

  8. You can blame our right wing flemish political appointees in the raad van bestuur for that. Not only do they want to have a minimal and obedient public broadcaster, they also gave in to the printed press monopolists and decided that VRT written articles are unfair competition for their paywalled clickbait diarrhea websites.

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