In honor of my birthday and my last site critique, I decided to critique the local newspaper’s, The (Raleigh) News & Observer’s Web site operations. For some reason, I find the site’s home page to be unappealing. I think it’s because of all of the white background space because visually it doesn’t have that much more content than most other news Web sites that I have visited.
From the home page, I really like the video player feature at the bottom of the screen. It looks really sharp, and draws me into the content. The N & O site also contains an extensive list of blogs, though the quality and quantity of posts varies widely. One of the better blogs is the Under the Dome feature about North Carolina politics.
One of the consistent things that I do have to harp on is that the N & O doesn’t link to other articles, which consistently bothers me. Also their type font on their articles is small and not space out well. When I look at the page, it just isn’t appealing to read the article. It makes me want to exit out of my window and read a font that is more palatable (such as The New York Times).
The site is doing some nice things though, such as the newly launched site, Triangle.com, which is including databases for crimes, courts, the education systems, etc. The site isn’t perfect, but it is trying to be more community-based, which I appreciate.
2 Comments
December 5, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Glad you like the blog. I’d be interested in your critique of Under the Dome’s design specifically.
Thanks for reading!
— RTB
December 5, 2007 at 5:43 pm
You can change the minimum text size in most browsers if you find the font size too small.