What's Good about the Bad and the Ugly

Web design is a new field and papers are at the forefront of pushing those boundaries. Papers experience varying degrees of success in this endeavor with some hitting a pitch-perfect note and others falling flat. One site that sings is Al-Jazeera's English news site. The site is attractive and lends itself to easy reading. The color scheme is pleasing. The negative space surrounding the central block of text is calming and gives the site a sense of balance.
The site is also, more importantly, sensibly organized, showcasing the stories and not the site. It does this by providing clear links along the side of the site. All the links appear before the reader has to scroll down, making the site easy to navigate. The designers also made sure to create a central story that is the focal point of the site. Highlighting fewer stories makes the paper less overwhelming and much more inviting.
But while sites can learn a lot about design from papers that do it well, papers can learn significantly more by studying design mistakes. (That's the philosophy behind the site, http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com.) I have to say the South Florida's Sun-Sentinel web site makes many mistakes other news organizations can learn from. The site is disorganized, jarring and obscures important news stories. I actually interned at the Sun-Sentinel during Summer 2006. While I loved the page design, I think the web site had a long way to go. I will look at two aspects: aesthetics (including organization) and ease of use.
The color scheme of the site is a somewhat jarring red, white and blue, a combination that is difficult to read on a computer screen. What really needs work, however, is the overall layout and organization of the paper. In print, Editor Earl Maucker has emphasized fewer stories on front, larger font size, bigger graphics and a newspaper index at the bottom of the page to help readers navigate the paper. What appears on the web is diametrically opposed to this model. The web site favors smaller font and cramming news stories together. It's hard to tell between the advertisements on the page and the Sentinel's video reports, polls and picture slide shows. The content on the page is all shifted to the left, leaving an inexplicable negative space on the right-hand side. The primary problem for the paper is that it tries to put everything on the home page and be all things to all people.
The site is also a little difficult to navigate. The primary problem is that it's difficult to see anything because the font is so small. The links are tucked away in the most obscure places. At the paper, the Travel section is managed by the Lifestyle department, but the section itself stands by itself on Sunday. Readers do not know that the Travel section is a part of the Lifestyle department, but that's where the section's link is located on the Sentinel's web site. Furthermore, the Lifestyle links are placed below the personals ads and other more consumer-friendly links. It's easy to miss the Sentinel's premier Lifestyle section. Additionally, it's easy to look over the Sentinel's excellent multimedia and youth content. What the paper should do is create bigger buttons below the masthead and create a button that links the work to the paper's multimedia projects, including videos and pictures, and youth-oriented content.