Evaluating News Sites

Analyzing content on The Washington Post website was not something that I expected to take several hours. My initial response was that although it is a powerful site it is lacking design and precision. The main menu bar was the equivalent of several signs with one word all glued together and even within the menus were advertisement which made no sense in that location. After reading several articles I began to realize it was quite easy to navigate around and luckily with my bug-me-not user name I was able to see everything. While testing the home page in IE 7 (XP) I noticed that over 1/3 of the page is just advertising, but much less appears on Firefox (OS X).

I’ve never been particularly impressed with The Washington Post Newspaper and their site left me feeling the same way. I haven’t had time to do anymore as this analysis took much longer than expected (just counting the blogs took quite some time). I will work on the next analysis on Thursday.