adrian holovaty

July 26, 2002, 11:34 PM ET

Site review: honoluluadvertiser.com

The Honolulu Advertiser's Web site is worth a look for its feeling of, well, freshness. Something about its combination of liberal font leading, flowery reds and blues, the always-slick Trebuchet MS, and the clean, airy balance of it all make it quite refreshing. Some thoughts:

• Its home page manages to pack in dozens of headlines while maintaining a clean, easily scannable architecture -- not an easy task. Breaking news gets priority at the top, in a no-nonsense textual list. When I checked in the evening, it listed the day's breaking news in one convenient spot labeled "BREAKING NEWS/PM UPDATES." This is a great, seemingly obvious way of presenting breaking news, but for some reason many news sites still don't provide a way of distinguishing online-only content.
• Unfortunately, the home page uses small fonts that can't be resized in IE for Windows, and it commits a further no-no by using points for its font units. (As many designers will tell you, points are meaningless on the Web.) That brings up an interesting question: What's better, to look great but make your users squint, or to look lousy but be accessible?
• The site continues to use old-fashioned FONT tags for text formatting, in addition to style sheets. It's always interesting to find a site that's still concerned with looking good in version 3.0 browsers.
• One of the site's strong points is its tendency to organize content logically, which is something on which we all can improve. I've already mentioned the home page's orderly headlines. In addition, check out its columnists page, which is yet another seemingly obvious feature that I don't see implemented often enough; its Back Issues page, which presents all the site's content since May 23 in easily grasped calendar form (one gripe here: not all newspaper stories get posted to the site); and a one-page approach to a photo gallery, on which the photos are a bit small, but, golly, they sure are organized neatly.
• Speaking of photos, the Advertiser uses tiny ones. They're absolutely minuscule, and that's not a good thing. Heck, the large flower image on the site's home page is larger than the page's lead art. Fortunately, clicking on a photo will get you a larger version -- albeit just a plain JPG, without any HTML around it. Whenever I run into this technique, I get a sense of cheapness. They didn't have time to wrap some HTML around the photo? That kind of thing can be automated.
• The story URLs are semi-trimmable, which is to say they make sense and still work logically when cut. For example, cutting en05a.html off this URL gets you the July 26 entertainment index; cutting the en gets you the entire July 26 issue index. It doesn't work at any higher level than that, but at least some of the URL is hackable, and that's a good thing.

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July 26, 2002, 8:51 PM ET

Redesign at canoe.ca

Craig Saila points out that CANOE (Canadian Online Explorer, "Canada's leading news and information site") has redesigned its home page.

I'd never been to the site, but I was struck by how jarringly different its site subsections are -- if "subsections" is an appropriate word. Compare, for instance, CNEWS to SLAM! Sports to C-Health to the Weather page -- all of which are listed in CANOE's "site index." (So I assume they're all considered part of the CANOE site.)

At first look, this is quite overwhelming and disorienting, almost surely proof that branding is not compatible with Web usability.

Then again, each subsection has a strong sense of identity and immerses readers in its content; readers are forced into the sections, one at a time, with no easy way out and limited means of distraction. I wonder whether readers would favor this more immersive type of design over a more traditional layout with, for example, a sitewide standard left rail navbar.

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