NYT: (Click thumbnail to enlarge)
The First Post: (Click thumbnail to enlarge)
Know of a well-designed newspaper homepage?
There is a discussion thread in the Visual Editors forums where newspaper designers are searching for examples of well-designed newspaper Web sites. I posted a short response there and below is my fuller explanation.
Why are so many newspapers designing their home pages to look like a Chinese menu prop from a B-movie? News sites are not merely cluttered, they are littered with clusters of clutter.
The truth hurts
Homepages like the NY Times.com are designed for Google bots first, humans second.
Search Engine bots can process a thousand homepage links in a blink. Humans, quite naturally, are overloaded by this type of presentation.
People need more visual cues, contrast and hierarchy to process all the amazing journalism they produce at NYT.
Out of habit, users give up when faced with SO MANY CHOICES in a page like this.
Graphic design does not increase your Web rankings.
In print media, art direction, color palettes, style guides and concepts like white space, dominant visual elements, the various modes of contrast, scale, and effective photo editing impact reading and comprehension . . . but a search engine bot could care less about all this.
What to we do when we humans do when facing the sensory overload of a thousand tiny links? Why, we quickly call up the search genie or subscribe to a favorite RSS feed for some much-needed filtering.
In digital media- dynamic content is king.
Recent studies show that creating interactivity with news content satisfies human visitors. It helps convince people arriving by search engines to linger a liitle longer.
To produce useful interactive multimedia requires different thinking and new skills, style will only take you so far.
The bots rule the homepage economy
Designing for bots pays the bills. News organizations want to get their new offerings to be ranked first for the places you, and millions of others go to news for first - another Web site. The search engines and portals drive page views and unique users - the currency publishers use to sell adverts.
Vivian Schiller of the NY Times told the World Newspaper Congress that the acquisition of Answers.com boosted NY Times.com page search rankings and web traffic considerably. “If you can’t grow it, buy it!” she told us at the conference.
What if you designed for humans first?
When considering home pages that are designed for readers with a pulse I have to ask, have you all seen ‘The First Post?’
—> http://thefirstpost.co.uk
Take a long look and link around - The First Post is organized, visual, inviting and built to human scale. They rely on proven principles borrowed from print artists but they extend their brand with interactive multimedia.
A luxurious style in a new machine-driven economy.
What are your fave best-designed Web sites?
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