CJOnline.com innovative site design
CJOnline.com, the award-winning Web site of The Topeka (Kan.) Capital-Journal, has had one of the more innovative site designs since it relaunched about a year ago. The site takes the mouseover concept further than other sites, embedding several layers of content that appears using DHTML, or dynamic HTML, as users mouse over tabs. There is a lot that news sites can learn from its approach.
Steve Outing offers a great analysis in E&P and gets some useful feeback on this approach from experts:
• Content can be too hidden with this approach. For instance, on CJOnline.com, to see the top sports headlines of the day, you have to move your mouse over the Sports tab underneath the main photo on the home page. "If you don't know to do that, then you don't see any sports headlines at all," Web-usability guru Jakob Nielsen tells Outing. "A better approach, perhaps, might be to highlight a couple of sports headlines and have a mouseover trigger that expands to show more stories or photos.
• Code the page so there's a slight delay before content changes on mouseover. That way, if the user is simply moving the mouse over an area while heading to another part of the page, it avoids confusing to the user.
• The mouseover-change technique makes more sense from a usability standpoint than the click-to-reveal-more-content approach, because the click approach is non-standard and potentially confusing.
May 19, 2004 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT
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1 comments about 'CJOnline.com innovative site design'An award went to a new site that has yet to put in any sort of RSS feed for it's visitors...before news sites should be pretty they should first be good at delivering the content.
Posted by Paul at October 25, 2007 10:23 AM
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