If newspapers were a web site
If newspapers were designed like web sites, they might look something like this. And really I didn’t even have enough space to fully enliven the evil of 200 links on a homepage. Arguably, this is actually better looking than a web site because there’s a mostly defined grid and navigable objects, plus everything is much bigger and there’s less lede-in text.
So what does that tell us? Maybe there’s something to those pesky print design principles after all?
I was once shut down by a coworker who basically said looking at news web sites like newspapers was absolutely wrong. Well maybe you don’t design them to LOOK like newspapers, but you design them for the same reasons. To guide people’s eyes through the day’s information. To help people understand context and information with inundating them with as much text as possible.
I just copy/pasted a news homepage’s text into Word. There are more than 3,000 words on a homepage and they’re not even contiguous. Who wants to get blinded by that?
In that light, perhaps this mockup is a somewhat better way to approach the news online? I’d argue, that after some thought, this is still wrong, but it’s closer than other places I’ve seen.
This is a mash up of screenshots, so ignore the colors and theme.
Here
Design elements, photos and text for broadsheet page courtesy of The Nevada Sagebrush.
Screenshots for new sagebrush site courtesy of Revolution Theme and IndyStar.com