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Why your news site design sucks and how to fix it

by Justin Heideman on Dec 13, 2009

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A short presentation on what is wrong with design for news-based websites.

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A short presentation on what is wrong with design for news-based websites.

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Why your news site design sucks and how to fix it — Presentation Transcript

WHY YOUR SITE SUCKS and some ideas to ﬁx it

MORE IS NOT BETTER

558 links 17 “links”

Number of links on homepage 600 558 450 427 425 300 323 225 220 199 186 150 151 0 Star Tribune NYT WaPo CNN Slate Google News MPR MnIndy Bring.mn Sites accessed 10 PM, December 7, 2009

Every story needs at least one image Make it big! Hey look, a rooster! ﬂickr photo by lucanrt

Get rid of flash (Except for video) A big flash flickr photo by Gentry's Daguerreian Studio

TYPOGRAPHY: Variation in scale? 18 pt 13 pt

TYPOGRAPHY: Variation in scale! 34 pt 10 pt

Web Type Tips • No more than 2.5 typefaces • Web-safe fonts are ugly • More leading • Have a type repertoire

1. Courier (or similar) 3. Agency (or similar) 5. Verdana 7. Helvetica 2. Arial 4. Times New Roman 6. Times

Big links for big sections

whitespace is nice space

Make search suck less • Recent content ﬁrst • Use faceting • Highlight search terms • Auto-complete

Performance: File Requests per page 300 240 180 120 60 0 Star Tribune NYT MinnPost Bring.mn MnIndy MPR News Q Google News

Performance: Page Size (kb) HTML Stylesheets Javascript Images Flash / Other 2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000 500 0 NYT Star Tribune MinnPost Bring.mn MnIndy MPR News Q Google News

CLIENT PERFORMANCE: • Does it scroll ok on an old computer? • Does it have lots of scripts?

Good Design = Good Business

Justin Heideman http://co-opmedia.org justin@co-opmedia.org @justinph

Why your news site design sucks and how to fix it

by Justin Heideman on Dec 13, 2009

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Why your news site design sucks and how to fix it — Presentation Transcript