If there are 1,000 newspaper.com sites, at least 999 of them — the one exception linked below — present users with way too many choices. For example, as pretty as the Houston Chronicle site is, it’s overloaded and bloated with links. WashingtonPost.com is a great web site, but suffers from an explosion of home page links.
Joel Spolsky writes about simplicity in software — keeping choices to a minimum, specifically avoiding redundancy, but his points should be considered by news site designers, as well.
Newspaper.com sites need to be less confusing, offer more direct choices, and recognize that the home page isn’t the only gateway into a web site (in other words, we don’t need to cram every last link onto that single, beleaguered default index page).
That said, I think SavannahNow is a little severe.
The main page is a gateway or swing site–not a true front news page.
Of Savannahnow.com, that is
[…] One of the big “web 2.0″ pushes seems to be for simplicity in home page design. So I completely agree with Howard Owens, who wrote before the Thanksgiving Holiday: Build simpler home pages. Newspaper.com sites need to be less confusing, offer more direct choices, and recognize that the home page isn’t the only gateway into a web site (in other words, we don’t need to cram ever last link onto that single, beleaguered default index page). […]
I think it’s just a matter of design. If the Houston front page had a little more spacing between things, a darker font color for the links, and maybe one thumbnail image for each news section link list, it might be easier to navigate.
The NYTimes home page is crammed with links, but I think it works. Why? Maybe it’s the narrow columns and serif fonts, a la print.
Ryan, there are a few newspaper sites out there that I think are still bloated, but do maintain a level of elegance about them that make them more navigable. NYT being one of them.
[…] In other words, keep your sites simple, and make your content easy to access and to share. […]