To: FoxNews.com
Subject: Site Design

I'm a big fan of FoxNews, and have been from Day 1. Indeed, at 6'8", I may very well be one of your biggest fans. You provide an invaluable service.

However....

I have seen your new website main page design.

It sucks.

Not it could use a little bit of work sucks.

Not someone must have missed a design meeting or two sucks, nor a forget the useability tests, we don't need 'em sucks.

Not even wow, our concept was flawed from the beginning sucks.

I'm talking about 30 solar masses' worth of Hoover™ vacuum cleaners collapsing inwards to form a black hole sucks. I mean industrial- and astronomical-grade suckage.

It appears you have given the keys to your web server to a pack of hyperactive highschool sophomore "Web Design 101" students. Students who also happen to be colorblind. And on crack.

Seriously.

I say this not only because I dislike the design on first sight, but also because for a number of years I have been a website architecture, navigation and design professional, with an emphasis on methods of providing content clearly, easily and accurately.

[This is what I used to be responsible for. I'll bet it gets more pageviews every day than your site does.]

Because I am not one to criticize without offering suggestions, I have a few tips for your design crew:

1. Make reading Web Pages That Suck mandatory for your web team. It's not Holy Writ, but it's definitely useful.

2. Don't intersperse your content with advertising banners throughout the page -- cluster the ads off to the side.

3. Speaking of "off to the side," in my current browser at a screen resolution of 1280x1024 there is a whole lot of wasted screen real estate off to the right. Consider using CSS, or even a percentage for the value of the width="xx" attribute in the <table> tags to define the screen area used, instead of fixed-width tables.

4. Consider stripping the ads from your main page altogether, and limiting their placement to a banner and/or sidebar on each individual "content" page.

5. Don't have multiple instances of the same item on the page (such as the market data listed at the top of the page and then again halfway down.)

6. Lose the background image. No one can see it, and it just wastes bandwidth, particularly for users with dialup connections. I know, I know -- it's not a huge image, byte-wise, but trust me on this.

7. Consider a permanent ban on pictures of Michael Moore. They only serve to nauseate your readers.

I hope you'll take these critiques in the same spirit in which they are offered.

Regards,
Russ

[h/t Spoons.]

Posted by Russ at 09:19 AM, June 15, 2004 in Memoranda