Because my blog posts of late have been very US-centric — no apologies, just a statement of fact — I decided it was time for me to start paying a little more attention to the town I live in and to start using local Vancouver media as a source for the news items I post. What I found after spending the morning on the website for the Vancouver Sun reminded me why I abandoned that site in the first place.
I like newspapers, and generally speaking, I like well-designed newspaper websites. To my mind, a well-designed newspaper website gives prominence to breaking or important news stories, features easy to use and uncluttered navigation, and makes good use of sidebars and/or a grid structure by placing special features less prominently on the page. To give you an idea of what I mean, take a look at front page of the Globe and Mail:
The site is easy to read, easy to scan, and makes good use of white space and images to add visual interest to the page. To top things off, the Globe and Mail makes an abundance of RSS feeds available for their different content areas, and while I wish their feeds offered full stories instead of excerpts, the excerpts are informative and provide an adequate summary of the related story’s content.
Now let’s have a look at the Vancouver Sun’s front page:
Take a look at navigation on the left hand side: I’ll grant you that choice is a good thing, but this is choice overload. I can only guess that the intent here is to provide “one-click” access to certain sub-sites, but one-click access isn’t always the best solution, especially if you have to spend more time scanning to find what you want.
And while we’re talking about scanning a page, the text size used on the front page is so small — all the better to cram more information in with! — that scannability is drastically reduced. There are no “increase text size” toggles on the page, so the designer seems to be relying on the idea that everyone knows how to increase text size in their browser. Yet increasing the text size only amplifies just how overcrowded the page really is.
In a 2004 report [PDF], the New Media Federation of the Newspaper Association of America found that the mean age of newspaper site readers is 39.1 years of age. Now, being that I’m sitting at about 39.3 years of age, I certainly don’t think 39 is old. Still, I can attest to the fact that at a certain magical point your eyes just don’t work as well as they used to, and it becomes difficult to read tiny text on crowded pages.
More and more information-heavy websites are turning full-page content layouts that work well at most resolutions. Looking at The Sun’s site, you’d think this was 1999 and people were still using computers where 800 x 600 was the highest resolution available. To be fair, the site does work well at 800 x 600, but look at how much space is wasted when the browser is resized to a 1024 x 768 resolution:
I don’t think I need to show you the vast gulf of space that exists when surfing at 1200 x 800, but I’ll say that it’s about as much space as you’ll find in a $450,000 Yaletown condo.
How a site looks is an important component of it’s overall usability. If type is too small, or if navigation is too complicated, then the site won’t be a pleasure to use. Tired, tight, cookie-cutter site designs like those employed across most Canada.com newspaper sites must go the way of the dodo. A flexible-width layout that uses whitespace wisely and increases readability and usability would make the Vancouver Sun a pleasure to read. As it stands, I’ll continue to turn to the (Toronto-based) Globe and Mail to satisfy my online newspaper needs.
