[thelist] What would be your perfect Newspaper website?

Francois Jordaan francois.jordaan at wheel.co.uk
Mon Nov 25 12:16:01 CST 2002


I use both news.bbc.co.uk and guardian.co.uk a lot, but that's probably more
because of the content than the design. But while I won't call either of
them beautiful, in both cases the navigation works well. What I particularly
appreciate of the Guardian is the degree to which it mirrors the offline
edition -- in other words the all the newspaper *sections* and *writers* are
easily findable in the navigation.

I've often been frustrated by the Guardian's Search function, though. I
think this is very important for a newspaper site.

A recent UK design I thought was admirable for its simplicity and good
HTML/CSS is the Independent's:
http://www.independent.co.uk/

It also uses a narrow unresizable article column, which you could say
"wastes" screen space but I had to admit to myself that it certainly aids
reading. Short line lengths, with little either side to distract from the
text. Having to press PageDown a few times is much less effort than resizing
the browser window IMO.

The potential wastage of paper when printed can be addressed by a print
stylesheet or a print template.

Another vote for
http://www.iht.com/
It's very attractively designed, very good HTML/CSS, and I do find its use
of DHTML often very well-considered, but I wouldn't recommend it as
essential.

I don't use it often enough to comment on the navigation aspect, but this
site is most content-centric of any news site I know. Very little clutter,
very unintrusive advertising. Its almost navigation-free design is quite
radical, but as I said I'd need to use it more often to decide whether it's
user-friendly. The site's not very good at encouraging contextual browsing
("related stories"/"wider context", which I find essential on news sites.
The BBC is excellent at this.

Another paper I don't read, but I've long admired the design of is
http://www.latimes.com/
They've redesigned recently, so one assumes it represents very recent
thinking. I see it requires registration now, though.

FWIW, the Wall Street Journal also redesigned their site this year. Also
requires registration. I've only looked at the tour, so I can't vouch for
how well it works.
http://public.wsj.com/tour/maintour.html
Probably a few ideas here you can use.

Finally, don't forget Wired News that launched their redesign last month:
http://www.wired.com/
What all sites should aspire to markup-wise (valid standards-compliant
table-free XHTML), although that's the bleeding edge for you. The good
markup makes it load very fast (it has a Holovaty code:content ratio 2-5
times better than any other news site*)
* http://www.holovaty.com/tools/getcontentsize

Personally, I find its design very attractive too. Low on navigation, except
for good contextual links. Also a good example of an expanding/liquid
layout. Looking at it now, I'd say its navigation is a very good model for
news sites to follow.

Hats off to the BBC for being the only news site I visited not to launch
pop-up windows.

francois

_____________________________________________________________________
This e-mail has been scanned for viruses by MessageLabs.



More information about the thelist mailing list