The_Guardian_site_review

//-reviewed by Akashdeep Ray//

The Guardian is one of the leading British daily newspapers. Its online arm, __guardian.co.uk __ provides an umbrella website for the contents from The Guardian, The Observer, and specific made for web content. Mark Porter, the creative editor of the Guardian explains the website's design philosophy as functions first, aesthetics second. Furthermore, it aims for a simple and usable design.

Information Architecture
Every news site is developed according to its underlying principles, the readers it attracts, goals and even its political inclinations. As it is owned by a nonprofit trust (Scott trust) instead of a publishing business houses like rival newspapers such as The Times (owned by News Corp.), it becomes less beholden to business interests. The online site has to reflect existing reader’s tastes who buy the print newspaper as well embrace the new media. The structure of the website would therefore differ greatly from a blog based news site such as Huffington Post. This is reflected on the index or the main page of the site. Even though the website uses podcasts and other multimedia features like sliding pictures, the main page is clutter free. There are no visual ads near the masthead, or anywhere in the page except for text based Google ads on the right most vertical pane towards the bottom. A major factor for information design is whether the information is free. Guardian has chosen to remain subscription free content for the time being. Therefore, the registration and user login is only required when the user wishes to contribute, such as to post comments. Multimedia, for example inline videos is visible more in the subsequent topic pages. The navigation is extremely consistent throughout the website with the use of breadcrumbs – the color of which corresponds to the text color given to the topics.

As competition on the net grows, there is an ever growing push for inclusion of multimedia analysis and the inclusion or highlighting user contribution. The internet after all has huge chunks of data, displaying a meaningful analysis of the data (news and statistics) would be a natural step forward. This kind of data analysis is missing in the Guardian website.

Mid-level design
One noticeable feature about the writing style is that an article always ends on the same page. This has the obvious advantage from the user point of view of reading the entire content once a page is loaded but it also has an effect on the limitation of content from the contributor’s end. The top menu bar is consistent throughout the website, with its color codes intact through the sub topic menu bar. However, there are inconsistencies in placing the guardian ads which shifted to the bottom right hand panel instead of the bottom panel at the end of the content as one digs deeper into the pages.

Low-level design
There is a consistent option throughout the website to increase or decrease the font size at the top of the web page. The topics on the navigation bar are color coded which again is highlighted when the mouse is hovered over them.