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News Network Design


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Hey guys, a couple of freshman students and I in Salisbury, MD were tired of the communication clubs offered at the university so we decided to create our own Independent News Network.

 

We get around 120 hits a day and we have just started not to long ago, maybe 3 weeks. If you could check the page and let me know what you think, it would be really appreciated!

 

www.inn.site11.com

 

We eventually want to generate revenue with the site. Any ideas on that?

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I generally dislike today's common site themes that make you scroll a lot.  I found that the bottom 25% of your page was wasted scrolling as well. I think the images on the landing page are grossly large, as well.  It made me feel like I had zoomed into the page dramatically.  I am positive if you were to reduce image size, it would be more pleasing to look at.  However, the pages "About Us" and "News Thread" did not have this problem.

 

I also noticed that you use a black background color for your css wrapper, but your body is slightly lighter.  I don't understand that.

 

If you're going to present a calandar of the month, please include the day digits.  That is, unless the first week of month begins on monday regardless if it is actually the 30th of the previous month.

 

Last comment I would make is a preference.  I feel there should be a top margin buffer separating the top of the page and it's contents.

 

Good luck on the project.  And kudos to you for having the balls to do your own thing.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Overall the site looks and functions fine.  I like the clean and neat layout. 

 

Couple of things:

 

1.  You mentioned in your post that this is school project of sorts - While maybe you are not intending to make this a school or area specific news site it would be nice to know who/where the group is from without having to read the individual bios or watch a video to figure it out (btw the video about the trays very comical issue but well done video and news story).

 

2. I was unable to "view" any of the stories on the calendar page due to some issue with the server (over load or something) on the first try.

 

3. Not sure I get the calendar view.  So your only doing one story a day?  Perfectly reasonable however if this is the case I don't think that the day of the month is the most relavant way to list the story.  I think you should add some more navigation for topics/categories that sort of thing.

 

4. If this is going to be a site based mostly around reading news/content I think that you should consider changing your color scheme as it is usually more difficult to read large bodies of text white on black.  While I have made this choice on one of my sites that has a lot of text - I often think I should change it for that reason but am not able to pick a different color scheme I am comfortable with for it.  I think you could easily move to a light grey with black or blue text for your wrapper.

 

5.  I agree with the post above - the white box with the faded backgound pic and text could be much smaller - or maybe moved to a sidebar or something.  It is way too big and takes up way to much screen real estate.  The information in the box is not nearly important enough.  The news should be the most predominate thing on the page - whatever page you are on - the largest item or thing attracting the most attention should be the most interesting thing.  As far as I can tell the white boxes seem to convey messages that could easily be indicated by the name of menu item:

  • when you click on archive it is obvious what one expects to find - instead of this box you could put a list of topics or a drop down menu of older dates that then take you to a list of titles (maybe with excerpts) of stories from that date/month/year or just delete the box and let people choose one of the video boxes.  Also, should the archive menu item be named video archive?  It doesn't seem to list any of the text content.

  • When you click on newsthread it seems to me someone must be looking for news.  Instead of taking up space telling them they came to the right place why not just let the see the news upfront and center - maybe a most recent post with excerpt could go there above the calendar.
     

  • Spotlight: I am on the INN site and clicked on SPOTLIGHT but you are using what looks like about 250 pixels to tell me where I am. Some of that info might be better suited for a side bar (maybe a photo of megan with a quick explanation of what or how she picks the cool artists on campus or what make her an authority or how one can submit themselves or a friend to be considered.
     

 

 

 

I am using chrome 10.0.648.151 on a mac book pro running OSX 10.6.6 1440 x 900.  Everything seems to work smoothly.

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