npr.com — sleek & simple
12 04, 2007
I don’t usually get my news from the radio and am more likely to switch stations from an unrecognizable classical piece to the latest poppy hit, but I was very impressed with npr.com’s streamlined website design. Upon first glance, the website looks just as busy as most news sites and many websites that are too much for the eyes. But upon closer inspection, npr.com’s links are uniform in design and the reader knows where they’re going before they click.
Close enough to the heart of this blog, take a look at npr.com’s Arts & Culture section. I love how the web designers kept the format as close to that of the homepage as possible. When I originally clicked on the tabbed section, I wasn’t completely sure I’d left the original page but I was happy to see how I didn’t have to learn another filing and sorting system just to view one of the website’s sub sections.
Even the photographs on the page are streamlined. Only one — the featured story — is larger than the rest and it’s instead the text and formatting that serves to separate how the stories are organized. While the page isn’t as colorful as many of its competitors, the link text helps the reader to know what they’re in for when they ask for more.
The “Movie Reviews” section is played up top without redundant images of the films the text describes. Each review links to a subsequent audio recording of the text which appears on the page with small images.
Overall, I was impressed with how pleasing the site was to look at and how easy it became to navigate. While the website did seem unfriendly to breaking news and multimedia, for a radio station, npr.com proved to be a welcome surprise to me.
