Observing Major News Websites

Published September 21st, 2008 in Galleries

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.

For inspirational design galleries, see:

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.

CNN

MSNBC

New York Times

New York Magazine

Wall Street Journal

Guardian

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.

17 Responses to “Observing Major News Websites”

Aja September 21st, 2008

thestranger.com is where I get my news.

Mike Smith September 22nd, 2008

wow. Every single one of them has a “FEATURED” post with a big image for the post and also all of them have a “recent news(esque)” section with small icons next to the titles/excerpts. Very similar to how a lot of the magazine style themes are with wordpress.

One thing I think though with blogs and going the “magazine style” route is making sure you’re going to be writing articles on a consistent basis. I did this for http://www.bootstrappingblog.com and have let it go and if you go to the main page, you see the same articles you would have seen a month ago So, consistent articles will make a layout like this work very well.

Good article here with some good links. Never knew a few of those news sites. Most have the same news though

Vladimir September 22nd, 2008

Thank you great post! With all these news sites you will probably learn all about grid design . I think you are missing maybe the most important “timesonline.co.uk” beautiful grid design. This post will definitely help finding new inspirations for my CSS Framework

Daniel September 22nd, 2008

I think the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news) has one of the best news layout.

Dainis Graveris September 22nd, 2008

Interesting stuff. The major websites also spend huge amounts of money, so also they could have the best thought-out design. Nice list!

Brent D. Payne September 23rd, 2008

I’m a fan of the L.A. Times site compared to the other Tribune sites. Just always preferred the cleaner design. Although Chicago Tribune’s recent design changes makes it much more appealing than 3 months ago.

As for Tribune’s competitor’s…I like NYT’s site. Very clean and easy to read. Newsweek would be second with a very interactive layout.

Brent D. Payne
SEO Manager
Tribune

mark b October 10th, 2008

There is a great local news site here in Perth called http://www.inmycommunity.com.au which focuses on very local news and views. It also seems to be combining its news side with some online community features like groups, reader blogs etc. Very interesting local news site.

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