News Page - San Diego Union-Tribune

http://www.signonsandiego.com/

Overall, the home page of the San Diego Union-Tribune is not designed well, although it does possess some good qualities. For someone who is arriving at the page from a link, it's hard to know exactly what the page is. I think the biggest mistake on the page is that the actual title of the news organization is one of the smallest pieces of text. The title should be instantly noticeable, especially since the URL is signonsandiego instead of sandiegouniontribune, or something like that. It would be more recognizable to do it this way.

I think that the drop-down boxes for navigation are pretty bad too. The links to inside pages are tiny, difficult to read, and also white against dark blue, which is not ideal.

One of the things that I liked about the page is that there were several interesting, large pictures which made it less boring. However, I would have preferred that the links to top headlines and most popular, etc. were on the right instead of the left, giving more attention to the stories that are on the main page.

When you first navigate to the page, what you see in the browser is not particularly interesting, so I would have probably put one of the interesting pictures "above the fold" instead of a bunch of text and headlines.