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--------> This message was posted to the ONLINE-NEWSPAPERS list. <--------

At 10:42 AM -0500 1/7/98, Kathy Keith wrote:
>I recently redesigned Pennsylvania Newspaper Publishers' Association's
>website (not live, yet) and became the object of much lobbying by the
>different department heads for better play on the homepage.  I showed them
>the site map, which is a useful tool to find information quickly. I also
>showed them how different pages come up in the search engine depending on
>what people are searching for. Although our site doesn't yet have a search
>engine, website search engines are another tool to combat screen
>limitations.
>
>What other ways are there to ensure a website's content is not missed by
>non-scrolling surfers? How do you organize the homepage to avoid clutter
>but ensure the site's content is fairly represented?


I would never say we found the right answer(s) to this dilemma, but we sure
tried. We recently redesigned the StarNews.com home page to address the
conflict between demand for first-screen space and need for adequate detail
in links.

Check http://www.starnews.com/ to get a feel for the layout. We replaced
many of our graphic-button links with dual outline lists in the first
screen. The page is several screens deep, but if all a viewer sees is the
first screen, he/she can still navigate to all the major site features and
get at least two news headlines.

Given my druthers, we would have cut back on the number of ad spots on the
first screen, but our old home page was positively miserable for ad
handling so we still see this as an improvement.

And you're right about adding easy search tools to avoid the problem of
bloated link collectives -- that's in the works for us, too.

j.

Jay Small, General Manager, Online Services         jsmall@starnews.com
Indianapolis Newspapers, Inc.         (317) 633-9197 fax (317) 633-1220
_______________________________________________________________________
StarNews.com, SpeedNet and Indiana's Game:     http://www.starnews.com/
Society for News Design:                            http://www.snd.org/



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