Kirk McElhearn muses on why newspaper website are so bad. While he is talking about usability more than visual design he has a very good point about the browsability of newspaper sites:
Leafing through a paper newspaper, one sees headlines on each page, and may end up reading stories that would not be likely to show up when customizing a web site by subject and keyword.
This is something I’ve been trying to address for the newspaper site I’m working on right now. Having a search feature is mandatory, but what most sites are missing is someway to skim and browse through content. And besides a proper navigational mechanism for browsing, you need to find a sweet-spot between too much content and too little. And what I think many information architects miss is that typography and visual design can make or break a sites’ browsability, even if the IA is perfect.
I read a lot of news articles online, but I almost never find them through the newspapers’ sites. I almost exclusively find news through a third party like Kottke or The Morning News. Every once in a while I’ll go to NYTimes.com but unless one of the few stories on the homepage jumps out at me I usually run the other way screaming.
Jim Says:
December 28th, 2005 at 1:50 pm
I honestly thought that this guy had ripped off your entry, but seeing as you’ve posted it here, I guess not ;)