why your news site design sucks and how to fix it

and some ideas to fix itWHY YOUR SITE SUCKS

MORE IS NOT BETTER

17 “links”558 links

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150

300

450

600

Star Tribune NYT WaPo CNN Slate Google News MPR MnIndy Bring.mn

151186199220225

323

425427

558

Number of links on homepage

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 flashflickr photo by Gentry's Daguerreian Studio

18 pt13 pt

TYPOGRAPHY:Variation in scale?

34 pt

10 pt

TYPOGRAPHY:Variation in scale!

Web Type Tips

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

1. Courier (or similar)2. Arial

3. Agency (or similar)4. Times New Roman

5. Verdana6. Times

7. Helvetica

Big links for big sections

whitespace is nice space

Make search suck less

• Recent content first

• Use faceting

• Highlight search terms

• Auto-complete

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Star Tribune NYT MinnPost Bring.mn MnIndy MPR News Q Google News

Performance:File Requests per page

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500

1,000

1,500

2,000

2,500

NYT Star Tribune MinnPost Bring.mn MnIndy MPR News Q Google News

Performance:Page Size (kb)

HTML Stylesheets JavascriptImages Flash / Other

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