The site embraces four search marketing and user-friendly vehicles that others are also moving to:
1) It's easy, simple-to-navigate, and uncluttered. (With a touch of rich media, simple is the new 'in').
2) It's more SEO friendly than the old CBS site. Perhaps less a few 'alt tags', the code is easier to crawl than ever.
3) User engagement is on board "Tell us what you think" and ...
4) Lots of video.
The tours offer you the choice of being introduced to the site by Katie Couric, Lara Logan, Charles Osgood, Bob Schieffer, Peter Van Sant, Lesley Stahl, or the CBS Early Show Anchor team.
It's a pretty good guess that they're keeping track off who you click on first :)
We did several pieces on CBS and their hyper web engagement during the CNET acquisition and after the 60 Minutes Stahl - Zuckerberg interview in January 2008. (It was well before the entire electronic world jumped on Facebook for promotional purposes).
CBS continues to innovate and do a little combat with their competitors here in the US, and now hundreds (thousands?) of news outlets around the world right here on the web.
The site designers also seem to have an affection for Darth Vader?!
If it's still there when you read this, the first line is within a comment tag (IE: You have to look at the source code to see it). Just before the first head tag.
-- Vader loves you and chad --
Apparently a reference to these guys.
You can check out the new Beta CBS News format here.