The home pages of most news Web sites are too cluttered and suffer from link and content overload. Nearly all handle photography poorly. Page designs are the same day after day. There's not enough hierarchy in story placement. Home page links are repetitive. Online classifieds design is often awful, making it difficult for consumers to find what they want. Advertising is handled so poorly that it's not effective.
These are some strong opinions. They're the view of an outspoken Virginia newspaper and Web designer, who believes that a decade into the online news revolution, the majority of newspapers have got their Web design fundamentally wrong. It's time to think about the "next generation" of newspaper Web design.
This is the beginning of an article published in Editor & Publisher about a different vision of what Web design should be for media Web sites. The vision belongs to Alan Jacobson, newspaper and Web designer, and the article is well worth reading by anyone who's found it frustrating to either use or publish a media Web site.
One of the most interesting things I found in this piece was how the International Herald Tribune allows you to page through subsequent screens of an article without ever really leaving the page, thanks to some elegant (and simple) DHTML code. Yes, my words seem counter-intuitive, but click the link and try it, and you'll see what I mean.
This is a graceful way of keeping key elements on a page (such as advertisements) without resorting to frames or other clunky solutions. It's also much less disorienting for the user--a form of navigation that exposes multiple pages of content without forcing the user to mentally keep track of where he or she's going.
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