While there are many reliable, easy to navigate news websites on the web today, there are some that just don’t make the mark. Good news sites are spaced well, allowing the reader to view their content easily , aren’t one-sided and never distract the reader with unnecessary gossip rather than facts. Here are some news websites that don’t allow the reader to feel engaged and focused but instead distracted.
- www.foxnews.com. Fox News is packed with the latest information but not quite in the way we want to see it. The website is very distracting with a busy and cluttered news outlay. There is an extensive amount of unnecessary commentary on their homepage, which gives readers a false sense of the amount of facts versus opinion offered.
- www.aol.com. While AOL works hard to bring attention back to themselves, their working even harder to revamp their website full of news and the most up to date information for its viewers. Wanting to turn the website into a premier destination for content like YouTube or Yahoo, it will be hard to pull off in a unique way.
- www.gamesindustry.biz This website, although it offers a significant amount of news updates is too busy and distracting. It has a lot of flash images that distract from the main news stories on their homepage, and is very cluttered in general.
- www.okmagazine.com OK Magazine is a low quality gossip magazine that is known for putting false, trivial information on their website and in their print magazine. While there website isn’t difficult to navigate through, there are some grammatical errors that can make a reader wonder about the professionalism behind it.
- www.freerepublic.com This political news website could be a lot better than it is, but the problem is, it’s hard to read and navigate through. The home page is messy and there aren’t main tabs to connect you with various themes of the site. As a website devoted to conservative activists, it has a ton of information but not enough images and direction to lead the readers to the abundance of information!
- www.drudgereport.com While the Drudge Report is a heavy traffic news website, it can be confusing to navigate through for the first time. Arriving at their home page, the articles aren’t in content form but rather links. The problem is, the links aren’t categorized in any way, so readers spend a lot of time searching through dozens of daily links instead of the convenience of reading them right there.
- www.nationalenquirer.com The National Enquirer is known as being a top gossip magazine but also for running stories with incorrect information about celebrities, movies and the media. The website doesn’t give you much room to click on one link before the unrelated advertisement next to it pulls you to their website. The homepage is crowded to make it enjoyable.
- www.weather.gov This website has over sixty million followers, but it’s not well designed. While it could be great, it falls short with too much business on the home page, and a very simple design and features throughout. The map is confusing and as a whole it doesn’t offer enough information.
- www.usda.gov This website offers a standard template so at first glance, it’s not visually stimulating at all. It resembles a typical government website with bland color themes and basic information that more often than not, leads its readers to links of different government and state websites.
- www.havenworks.com Until you go to havenworks, you won’t believe the amount of information that can be crammed onto a homepage. It’s as if they tried to stuff every major news story they could from the entire year onto their website. While it provides readers with an abundance of information, it can be very difficult to read and leaves no room for readers to tell which category ends and another begins. While there goal was to provide readers with any news related information on the web at one place, the result doesn’t pan out to be easily to read or navigate through.
A good website will be structured to balance content and a well designed homepage to grab the reader’s attention and have them coming back for more. There will be clear categories and tabs guiding them easily throughout the site, and the content will relate to the overall intention of the website. These websites listed failed in one of those categories. Although many of them provided excellent content, they may have been lacking in other areas, but you’ll have to see for yourself.
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