Mirror - Update Your Website
What we see on the web today in terms of graphics, layouts and design owes much to the newspaper industry. The printed media is the grand-daddy of website design and the two are pretty closely linked. The largest newspapers are also the largest journalistic sites on the web. Some are also some of the best looking and influential websites, such as the New York Times.
But newspapers are not perfect and they are also not the fastest to change. Having said that the web has been around long enough now, that all major media outlets should have great websites. Tabloids are different though. They don’t care. They don’t care for journalistic standards, style, information or providing a public service. Advertising income at whatever cost seems like the order of the day.
And so it is with no surprise I stumble upon the cack-handed web presence of the Mirror. The New York Times, it ain’t. The Mirror is an ugly website. A blurred, crammed vision of what a media website should be.
The images are as blurry as the cheap shots they publish in the real newspaper so at least they are consistent. The padding of elements is all over the place, so while vertical padding is fine, the horizontal spacing is too tight. There are some garish colour clashes and font-sizes seemed to have been chosen at random.
There are also too many advertisments on the homepage. These ads follow no particular template and overall produce a dogs breakfast approach to design.
So why am I reviewing a tabloid, should they know better? Yes they should. They are a multi-million pound empire and can well afford a little bit of design work. Furthermore the best part of the real paper - the witty headlines and capitalised impact fonts are not present. They have been forgotten and what is left is just a cheap hodge podge of c.1999 website design.
The owners real need to have a long hard look at themselves in the Mirror.co.uk
Posted 30.10.07