The Wall Street Journal's new website is beautiful, but still restricted.

When logging onto the old version of WSJ.com, I always expected bits of mold and rust to start growing out of the corners of my browser. The site was shackled to a philosophy that the Web’s selling point was text, not graphics, images, and tools. The layout was incohesive, public feedback was conspicuously absent, and breaking news was poorly separated from pieces filed the night before. The site was built for a technological and economic age that had long since passed.

All of the aesthetics, though, were shallow next to the site’s true anachronism: a subscription business model. Time and again, Web sites have shown that bulldozing the walls of the garden brings in more users and ad dollars to justify the loss of subscription revenue. The Wall Street Journal, though, has always been a rare profitable exception. And after flirting with the idea of taking down WSJ.com’s pay wall, Rupert Murdoch decided to keep the current model.

That brings us to Tuesday’s relaunch of the paper’s Web site. It’s a Herculean accomplishment that shows not only that WSJ.com knows what it’s been missing but that it has its own ideas of the future of the financial Web. The accomplishment is even more impressive given the mandate to keep the pay wall. But that fissure between subscribers and casual visitors has now created two significantly different WSJ.coms. Murdoch has shoved the Journal into schizophrenia.

First to the aesthetics, a striking departure from the Journal’s old white-and-blue color scheme. We’re now treated to a deep-blue-and-beige scheme, accentuated by a black top bar and horizontal borders. The navigation is crisp and harkens to Amazon’s horizontal, tab-oriented layout. Ads have been added to the mix and are prominent without being obtrusive. Flashy slide shows litter the site and do their best to add panache to the almost-always-boring business photos resting within. The favicon is one of the few survivors from the previous site, and it looks positively dowdy by comparison.

The site is also overflowing with interactive tools. They’ve got graphs with bits of news that pop up when you roll your mouse over the corresponding orb. Their markets page’s layout can be customized a la iGoogle. A “newsreel” bar follows you across the site, offering you more top stories. As a symbol of how far the Journal has come, the newsreel is widgetizable for people to splash across the Web. Sure, hardly anybody will actually put it on their site, but it at least proves WSJ knows what today’s Web world of distributed content is all about. The site is so Webby, the most-read module on the home page even has a ranking graphic that looks as if it was pilfered from Digg.

For subscribers and nonsubscribers alike, the article pages are a revelation. The site expands on CNN.com’s layout by tabbing the content into multiple sections. First you have your editorial text, which is supplemented by graphs, photos, stipple portraits, etc. Separated from that, but still accessible, are slide shows, videos, and comments. Removing the comments from the editorial content is a suave and deft tactic. It allows the Journal’s content to remain dead-tree professional for old-timers while inviting more active, Webby users to partake in the discussion on a separate tab. They’re there for those who want them, but they don’t clutter the screen and extend the page for those who don’t.