Memo to FoxNews
Posted By Russ Emerson on June 15, 2004 at 9:19 am
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:
- Make reading Web Pages That Suck mandatory for your web team. It’s not Holy Writ, but it’s definitely useful.
- Don’t intersperse your content with advertising banners throughout the page — cluster the ads off to the side.
- Speaking of “off to the side,” in my current browser at a screen resolution of 1280×1024 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.
- Consider stripping the ads from your main page altogether, and limiting their placement to a banner and/or sidebar on each individual “content” page.
- 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.)
- 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.
- Consider a permanent ban on pictures of Michael Moore. They only serve to nauseate your readers.
On the “plus” side, at least I don’t see you using any <blink> tags. So maybe there’s hope, after all.
I hope you’ll take these critiques in the same spirit in which they are offered.
Regards,
Russ
[h/t Spoons.]