On the home page of the University of Nebraska newspaper’s website, there are a total of eight main links with a drop-down menu upon rolling over the links. They are labeled clearly, and the groups make sense, but there is no distinction between the primary and secondary links. Both types share the same font size and weight, with the identical rollover treatments. The navigation remains in the same place, however, no matter how deep you go into the site, which makes people easily make their way back to another page without having to go back.
The home page is always accessible also by clicking on the “Daily Nebraskan” logo on the top of the page. There is no selected state, which would be helpful in letting people know visually where they are at in the architecture of the website, which seems pretty flat, thanks to the drop-down menu on rolling over the main links. The architecture seems moderately deep, seeing how it is a news website. There are a lot of pages, since there is a plethora of articles and videos. Additional links do appear; however, as you go further into the site, which is good because the objective of a website is to break down information into smaller pieces, and if the links to all the articles were to be available on each page, the website would be a disorganized pile of information.
The hierarchy of the typography is very obvious, since they employed a variety of techniques to create a distinction between headlines and the content with the use of size, weight, color, and alignment. The structures of the pages stay consistent as you go from one page to another. This was done intentionally so that people can find the information they are looking for in the expected places.
The focal point of any page is the ad that is on top of the page, above the “Daily Nebraskan” logo. This is due to the fact that most news stories are not accompanied by photos or graphics. Therefore, the ads are the elements of a given page that stand out in color and placement, since you see the ad before the “Daily Nebraskan” logo. Since there is a lack of photos on the site, I would like to see more of them to supplement the content on the pages, which is mostly text. The website makes light use of icons, and seeing how they are conventional and have a word next to it to describe what It means, it did not take long for me to understand the meaning of them.
Black, red, and white are the primary colors of the website. The colors are used in text to create a typographical hierarchy, red to indicate the navigation bar, and black as the background with a white box that contains the content. These colors were chosen to emulate the school colors.
The purpose of this site is to provide news that would concern University of Nebraska students and to supplement the print edition of the paper. There is a search feature that has the ability to look for very specific articles. To search for a phrase, quotes can be used, and you can also indicate the time frame of issues in which to look into. A feature that I find the most useful is the multimedia that is available on this website. The articles can always be accessible in print, whereas videos cannot.
This website seems to be very simple. It is fairly easy to understand how to navigate through pages, and with a breadcrumb, you can see at a glance where you are within the website.
No comments:
Post a Comment