Tetteh C. Reginald

Anna Voisard

ENGL 21007

31st October, 2016

CNN versus Ebay

CNN is a television and news agency. Most of the time, I am away from the television,

and so I generally visit the CNN website on my phone or laptop. Ebay on the other hand is an

ecommerce website where goods and products are sold. Today I would be evaluating the design

of both the CNN website and the Ebay website for their flaws and strengths. This will be done by

comparing the CNN websites features to that of Ebay’s website features.

CNN

To start with, the CNN website has a very simple but complex layout. This site makes

good use of the proximity design principle. All similar news types are grouped close to one

another. Also, details about headlines are closer to the headline. Due to the difficulty in figuring

all news in the world, CNN.com has categorized some distinct types of news under a broad

section called top stories.

The top stories section has the latest important news from all over the world closely

written near each other together in one row of the page. These stories are usually composed of

hot issues from countries all around the world. Since all news belonging to the top stories

section has been arranged tightly together, it makes it easier for readers to regard information

under this section as one entity. This makes reading easier.

Figure 1. Image of CNN.com Header with navigation boxes

CNN.com has a very big and detailed header. The header contains multiple navigation

boxes which have names of other genres of news written in them. These boxes have a black

background, and they contain names of the news genre and other options. These names have a

font point of about 14 and have been written with the colour of white. The white font against the

black background creates contrast which enables readers to read what is in the header easily.

Also, when you click on a certain genre in the header, the name of the genre is highlighted with a

sharper and brighter white colour which becomes distinct from every text written in the header

and the boxes. Located in the header are genres of news such as US, WORLD, POLITICS and

other options such as live TV etc. The page of the genre type in which you are on currently is

highlighted with a white colour. This highlight creates a contrast between the header background

and the name of the page you are on currently. The header is always at the top of the screen no

matter how down you scroll. This makes navigation really easy since at any point in time you

have instant access to this header and its navigation links.

Down below, there is a complete site map of the website. It has all the subtopics linked to each

page written like a tree diagram. The sitemap is very helpful for people who are new to this

website. You can look at the site map and know how each genre and page are divided into

subsections. Even though you may never use the sitemap due to the easy navigation of this

website, it still might be of use to people with disabilities. Also, the site map uses great contrast

to make the fonts on the site map very readable. (White fonts against a black background)

Instead of CNN.com having very big images which make information reading very difficult

when reading on a small screen, images are represented with small thumbnail images. If you

want to see the whole image you might click on the thumbnails which reveal the full size of the

image. Not only images are represented by thumbnails. Videos are also represented by

thumbnails. Thumbnails of images have an icon that looks like a camera on them while videos

are represented with thumbnails that have a play symbol on them. www.cnn.com

Figure 3. Image showing sitemap of CNN.com

Figure 4. Image showing the use of alignment and representation of images and videos with thumbnails

Figure 5. Image showing the use of proximity

The images and videos are also in close proximity with the News text they describe. This

is convenient since you could just look at the nearest headline to a video or image and determine

which headline the videos or images are related to.

CNN.com uses repetition effectively. Almost all pages of CNN.com have a similar

layout. This makes navigation through CNN.com much easier since knowledge of operation

obtained from one page can be used on all pages on this website. All text and information on this

website are aligned in columns and rows. News which are similar or are in the same section are

aligned together. This aids readers to anticipate other news headlines aligned together without

even having to read the actual headlines. This website has extra features like timestamp of news

headlines. This time stamp gives you details about when a particular a story was published even

before you click and try to read the story. Also after reading news from this website, it tends to

recognize the type of news you often read. It then recommends some group of news which is

based on your reading history the next time you visit the page. The only problem I have with this

website is the number of advertisements that pop up every time you begin to watch news videos.

This can sometimes be worrying. This is a link that would prove what I am just saying about the

ads CNN.com.

EBAY

The second website I would like to analyze is Ebay.com. Ebay.com also has a header which also

contains few navigational links and a search box. As compared to CNN.com, the header bar of

Ebay.com does not make use of the principle of contrast. When a particular page is selected from

the header, the header does not indicate that particular page’s name with a distinctive colour.

Also unlike CNN.com where the header is always on top of your screen no matter how down you

scroll Ebay’s header does not become available when you scroll down. This makes navigation

difficult since you would have to scroll up again in order to get to the header.

The text on this page is not aligned properly compared to the CNN website. It has images and

text mixed together in a scattered manner. This makes reading a little difficult. Most images are

bright and might distract you from what you are actually looking for. Due to a lot of images,

there is less information available about a specific product. This website is not very suitable for

small screens. This is because it uses very large images which fill up the whole of your device’s

screen. When viewing Ebay.com on a small screen device, you have to scroll multiple times

before you get to an actual text description. In other words, the amount of texts to images is not

balanced. Ebay.com

Figure 6. Image showing the Header of ebay.com

Ebay.com also makes use of the principle of repetition. Most of the pages on this

website just like the CNN website also has similar patterns and designs. This again makes the

Figure 3. Image showing the unbalanced nature of text and images on Ebay.com

application of knowledge from one page to another very easy. Also, tools for this websites are

all located in similar locations on all of its pages. Ebay.com also has a sitemap similar to

CNN.com. Unlike CNN, Ebay’s site map has font whose colours make it very difficult to read

(Grey fonts against a white background). The contrast of the fonts and the back ground almost

makes the fonts undistinguishable.

Ebay.com has some additional features which complement the use and design of the

website. One of the features it provides is a review and comment section for customers on

every product. This section is provided so that customers would be able to give reviews and talk

about their expectation of the product and the level to which the product has met such

expectations. Also, these sections can be used to ask questions about a product.

Ebay.com and CNN.com are all great websites. As I stated above it can be inferred that

the CNN.com is definitely well designed than that of Ebay.com. The reason for this is, Ebay is a

shopping website hence any additional design would slow down transactions unlike CNN.com

which is a news website. In general, both websites serve their purpose fairly well but in terms

of design CNN.com is the best.

Works Cited

"CNN - Breaking News, Latest News and Videos." CNN. Cable News Network, n.d. Web. 31

Oct. 2016.

"EBay." Electronics, Cars, Fashion, Collectibles, Coupons and More. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 Oct.

2016.