Text is not Dead

“It’s what’s inside that counts,” and “Looks don’t matter.” Those words are wise, but completely irrelevant to websites. The age-old argument of form versus content has been brought back to life by websites, especially news websites because of the abundance of content and the need to make it easily accessible. The design of news websites is especially key because people become familiar with their preferred sites. And, that familiarity becomes more and more necessary when people need to find a specific article. People return to them morning after morning sometimes looking for something specific or routinely reading their favorite sections. If the layout is illogical or too busy and the person has to click around to no avail, another website is not far from reach. Personally, I have little patience for designs that make specific sections difficult to navigate.

To get an idea of where The Hartford Courant falls between form and content, I compared the content of the Middletown section to the Middletown Press. Being that I live and work in Middletown, I have a solid sense of the events going on and the kinds of stories about which I want to read. I find the website for the Courant organized to push forward the stories created by the citizen journalist, the individual voice. The section on Middletown features headlines along the left side and at the bottom part of the page, but in the center, in a highlighted box, is a list of reader-submitted headlines. Strangely, The Huffington Post, a much different news source, putting it mildly, places the blogs along the side and the news stories, regardless if topic in the center, with the biggest story of the moment glaringly placed at the top of the page. I wonder if in the interest of profit and maintaining readership, the Courant has aimed to emphasize the independent voice.

Steven Snell wrote about the design and layout of news websites in November of 2008. According to him, the Courant initially looks typical for a news site:

Color Schemes
Most news websites use dark text on a white background. Obviously, these websites contain a huge volume of content, and readability is important. A few of the websites mentioned later in this article use darker colors for headers or for the body of the page outside the content.

A large percentage of news websites also use blue and red in addition to a dark gray or black for text. Blue is extremely common for headlines, article titles and links. Red is often used sparingly as an accent color. Some news websites also mix in more colors in other places, such as in the navigation.

While the basic layout looks like that of a traditional news source, the advertising is too distracting, and the element I truly dislike is the ad that looks like the upper right-hand corner of the “page” has been turned down. When hovering the mouse over the, the viewer has to endure the truly cheesy animation that shows the image of a partial page turn, revealing the advertisement on the other side. When reading a site, I can think of few things more irritating than having to pay attention to the position of my curser.

However, as far as content is concerned, the Courant’s Middletown section has far superior and more relevant articles about the town. As a resident of the city, I know that the story of the Food not Bombs issue is key. The Middletown Press, however, did not cover it on this day. Additionally, The Hartford Courant has an article covering the event, Bikers for Babies. The Middletown Press has an article with a rather unclear relation to Middletown about a car chase through three towns (none of them Middletown), and the driver of the car was from Deep River. Suffice to say, The Hartford Courant, in this quick comparison has relevant and important content, and as a side note, the design of The Middletown press is far from impressive.

So, what trumps the other- form or content? Should they be equal? Does the poor quality of either individually affect the site as a whole? As a writer and not a designer, I am on the side of content in the debate, and I am far more willing to put up with the oversized ads and the fact that I have to hunt around a bit for a story than I am to read poor or irrelevant writing.