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

Here’s the hitch: The comments aren’t open to everybody. Casual visitors may look, but they cannot touch. Only those who are subscribers—at $90 or $100 a year—get the privilege to chime in to the conversation, and their comments will show up for everybody. WSJ’s walled garden has become a greenhouse. (This may be a good thing considering that comments have become a scourge on some Web sites.)

There’s also a new WSJ “community” feature that is open only to those with subscription access. The community is a reasonably well-designed forum for people to hash out Wall Street Journal-esque issues (politics, markets, and—wait for it—management skills). Nonsubscribers see the link to this feature but can’t even see what’s being advertised. Not the smartest way to try and entice new membership. For now, the whiz-bang graphics remain open to all, but that’s not guaranteed to last.

There’s also an open question about how the new site is interacting with large news aggregators. In the past, subscriber-only content on WSJ.com has been accessible if you came to it through Digg or Google News. In The Big Money’s tests, the Digg workaround was still working, but you can no longer get to walled content via Google News. This has huge implications for the Journal’s traffic numbers (which have risen 84 percent this year, according to WSJ) and its ad revenue. TBM asked a PR rep whether the WSJ was backing off its relationship with Google News, and she said it was not. When TBM showed her a link that led to preview-only content, she said it might be a tech anomaly, and the Journal is checking in with Google. This story will be updated if further details are sent along.  (UPDATE Sept. 17, 6:00 p.m.: The Google News unfriendliness The Big Money stumbled across is affecting only a small number of stories, according to WSJ's press team. They're working to correct the problem, and still plan to offer full access via Google News.)

The aesthetics are also different for the haves and have-nots. The color scheme for nonsubscribers is filled with more black. The mix of stories on the home page is drastically different, with more lifestyle coverage offered to nonsubscribers. As of this writing, the subscriber home page’s lead story is a full package on the Fed’s inaction today. For nonsubscribers, the Fed story still leads but is supplemented with pieces on Pakistan, China, and domestic politics.

In The Big Money’s brief time spent with the site, not many subscriber-only articles were advertised to nonsubscribers on the home page. It seems strange considering Murdoch believes the Journal’s deeply sourced financial content to be the paper’s selling point online. It suggests the paper has eased efforts to convince non-WSJ subscribers to join the club.

If that’s the case, then WSJ seems content to operate two different Web sites—one for financial die-hards and one for the average news consumer. But as financial news continues to seep into all the other news stories, that type of separation isn’t just bad policy; it’s also potentially bad business.