Major News Websites: Design Trends and Inspiration Gallery
Designers of news websites face significant challenges in trying to develop an attractive, usable site that gets all of the necessary items on the page with as little clutter as possible. Studying the layouts and design techniques used on news sites can be a beneficial experience even for designers who only work on smaller sites and blog design.
Most large news sites have strengths and weaknesses, both of which can provide excellent learning opportunities.
In this post we’ll take a look at the most popular news websites design ideas you can implement in other news layouts. All of these examples provide some lessons that can be used in designing sites of all sizes.
One of the hardest things to do when designing a site is to take an objective look at it from the perspective of a visitor. When visiting news sites it’s easy to find some things that are distracting and cluttered, and you may find some ways of laying out content that you really like from user’s point of view.
The Best News Websites:
The following ten sites are the ones that I consider to be the best in terms of layout and overall design (not taking coding into consideration here). Following these ten, we’ll see a number of other news sites, some better than others. These ten sites stand out from the others for one reason or another. Some make better use of colors, whitespace, headers, etc. All of them do a pretty good job of dealing with massive amounts of content on the front page.
CNN
MSNBC
New York Times
New York Magazine
Gapers Block
The Morning News
ABC News
Wall Street Journal
Guardian
Other News Sites:
The remaining news sites shown here will all provide some learning experiences, good and bad.
Take a look through them and see how the design and layout affects you as a visitor in terms of finding the content and navigation through the site. These same elements are issues that you will deal with on your own projects, particularly in blog design where lots of content is involved and freshness is a factor in what visitors will want to find.
Major News Sites:
CBS News
Fox News
Fox News
Yahoo! News
AOL News
MSN
CNET News
Time
Newsweek
US News & World Report
Newspapers:
Washington Post
LA Times
Chicago Tribune
USA Today
Business News:
Business Week
CNBC
Sports News:
Sports Illustrated
ESPN
Fox Sports
UK News:
BBC
The Independent
Other News:
Discovery News
NZ Herald
CBC News
The Australian
News.com.au
For more inspirational design galleries check out:
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