Breaking Down the Star Telegram

Arlington Star-Telegram

http://www.star-telegram.com/

I chose this site because it is my hometown paper and a paper I have grown up with in my house. It was interesting to see how it was different from other local papers and national news sites.

Graphic Desgin – As far as graphics, there doesn’t appear to be very much graphic design besides the headline. The site is pretty simple graphically.

Document Production – The site is full of text content, there is not much multi-media on the surface you have to dig deeper for that. Even with in the stories there is very little graphics and the heart of the news is really in the text.

Information Design – Some of the information is presented through video but most of it is read by clicking on headlines. There is a variety of information design on this site though, some stories have the first paragraph for you and others it is just the headline, I see it to be quite unappealing to not have it consistent.

Scripting & Programming – Oddly enough, when looking at the scripting for this site it appears that they don’t use PHP and that it is all put into the original document of the html. I could be wrong but it doesn’t look like many of the other sites that I have seen.

Interface Design – The site is very cluttered and not organized, the concepts of the site are cool and very useful to consumers but it is not easy to find exactly what you are looking for on the site. The best part of the site is where users can choose the headlines based on their city. There is a navigation bar at the top which is very organized and useful, and a section at the bottom of the page for graphics, and videos. And as usual there is a place for readers to comment or vote in polls,.

Breaking Down World News

www.WN.com

I chose this site because it has direct forcus on world news and I had never heard of it before.


Graphic Design – The graphic design in not overkill it is simple but I think that it looks clean. Besides the title there is also a cool graphic of a world in the corner that adds a little something to the page.

Document Production – The sites main focal point is a slide show of news stories, it has a picture, a title and a paragraph of the story. The site is organized but also has a lot of stories and information; it is not nearly as jumbled and wordy as the NYTimes

Information Design – The stories are shown with the first paragraph but it has a read more tab so that you can navigate to another story. There doesn’t appear to be many videos as stories but they do have a lot of compelling graphics and slide shows.

Scripting & Programming – They are getting a lot of the stories from other sites so it doesn’t look like reporters submit articles as much as the site just pulls stories from a server and from other sites runs the site.

Interface Design – The site is incredibly organized and easy to navigate, along with navigation bar at the top there is also stories that are divided by region and by most popular and recent. It is also interesting because the site offers services like film reviews, hotels, and even a news letter. Also they deliver the information in 49 different languages, which really gives them a competitive edge.

Breaking Down CNN

CNN.com → I choose this site because it is a more popular site that is well known. Also CNN would have a bigger budget for things such as a web page than smaller news organizations and I wanted to see how they would compare.

Graphic Design – There doesn’t appear to be a ton a graphic design outside of the header. There are a few advertisements but nothing that is a main focus.

Document Production – Immediately you notice on CNN that a lot of the content is through video or slide shows, those also act as the main focus point on the page bringing stories right to the readers face so they can’t miss it. Also instead of putting a teaser or first few sentences of a story they just use the headlines to grab reader’s attention.


Information Design – Instead of wordy stories CNN puts a lot of focus on videos and the use of graphics, they do have some stories that are just text but they accompanied by engaging graphics. The information is presented to readers in a more newscast type of way, and they do a great job using multi-media.


Scripting & Programming – Javascript is used a lot through out the code mainly focusing on text and images. As far as the server side it appears that articles are inserted using back end, it is obviously pulling it off of a server and I think it is using php because the url changes after the article is downloaded.

Interface Design – The site overall is very clean and organized, not only is there a very clear navigation bar at the top but also there are a block of sections near the bottom that has all the categories broken down with headlines to make it easy to see what is going on in each of the sections. CNN is linked to Facebook so readers can log in using that, they are also a part of the other various social media sites. On top of being able to leave comments readers can also participate in polls.

It is obvious that money does play a big part with CNN, their site overall is informational and professional.

Dallas News Site

Dallas News
http://www.dallasnews.com/

Why? I chose this site because I am from the Dallas area and thought that it would have a good site, overall I think that I was wrong. It was not visually appealing and the information was all over the place.

Graphic Design → The graphic design of this site leaves a lot of room for adds, the first thing you see is the big pop up add that shows up, it isn’t necessarily graphic design but it is still obnoxious. The coding makes it easy to see that this webpage was put together in very simple html and css.

Document Production → The content on the page is very amateur and not in a professional lay out. It is almost in blog format the way the articles are put in order. The content is also is a little hard to follow. Overall the content is not up to par with many bigger news sites and is not visually appealing.

Information Design → The stories are relatively bland there are not many photos or graphs. There are not many ways for readers to get the information besides just reading the plain text. The site does have very useful side bars of information such as a superbowl countdown, an activities calendar and a weather bar.

Scripting & Programmin → The coding shows that this site is very simple coding wise. They do use java script a lot mainly for text. It makes you join to see all the content but from the looks of it it seems that the content is not entered by the authors.

Interface Design → The multiple navigation bars make it easy to find the category you are looking for. It is easy to get around. The site is also pretty engaging readers are able to leave comments and search events going on in the Dallas area. They are also able to connect via the usually social networks such as facebook and twitter.

Breaking Down the New York TImes

http://www.nytimes.com

Graphic Desgin
The graphic design on the NYTimes site is not so much about attacting attention with graphics but with the content. It is has little pictures but a ton of information and stories, it is almost too cluttered for my taste but since the NYTimes is meant to produce hard hitting information this design seems to work for them.

Document Production
The NYTimes does a great job using graphs to explain stories. Many of their stories have a graph or video that goes more in-depth into the story. While many news sites use their videos, and graphs to attract people to the story New York Times does not, their document production is buried with in the content, meaning that people have to be drawn in by the headline not the video.

Information Design
The information design for the NYTimes is not the most creative that I have seen, the home page is rather bland but when you do finally find a graphic that represents a story they are incredibly detailed and do a very good job literally showing the reader the information.

Scripting & Programming – The site uses JavaScript but from what I could tell not very much of it, it was mainly used for images.

scripting - not really sure what this is.

Interface Design – The New York Times interface design is not typical of a news site, the navigation categories are on the side of the screen and are not very prominent. There is also another nav bar at the top of the site but again it is very small. It seems as if for the most they want you to read what they think is important by making that take up the majority of the page and not making the navigation bars prominent. The site also offers readers to connect via facebook and twitter and with this they are able to leave comments and participate in polls.