Observing Major News Websites
September 22, 2008 – 3:36 am
Designers of news websites face significant challenges in trying to develop an attractive, usable site that gets all of the necessary items on the page with as little clutter as possible. Studying the layouts and design techniques used on news sites can be a beneficial experience even for designers who only work on smaller sites and blog design.
Most large news sites have strengths and weaknesses, both of which can provide excellent learning opportunities. All designers face challenges involving which content should be featured on a page and how the layout can be designed to support all of the needed content.
In this post we’ll take a look at over 40 large news sites, all of which provide some lessons that can be used in designing sites of all sizes. Often, one of the hardest things to do when designing a site is to take an objective look at it from the perspective of a visitor. When visiting news sites it’s easy to find some things that are distracting and cluttered, and you may find some ways of laying out content that you really like from user’s point of view.
The Best News Websites:
The following ten sites are the ones that I consider to be the best in terms of layout and overall design (not taking coding into consideration here). Following these ten, we’ll see a number of other news sites, some better than others. These ten sites stand out from the others for one reason or another. Some make better use of colors, whitespace, headers, etc. All of them do a pretty good job of dealing with massive amounts of content on the front page.
Other News Sites:
The remaining 30+ news sites shown here will all provide some learning experiences, good and bad. Take a look through them and see how the design and layout affects you as a visitor in terms of finding the content and navigation through the site. These same elements are issues that you will deal with on your own projects, particularly in blog design where lots of content is involved and freshness is a factor in what visitors will want to find.
Major News Sites:
Newspapers:
Business News:
Sports News:
UK News:
Other News:
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