Stephen Fleming recently critiqued the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s homepage and he did it in a very cool way.
This would be a good exercise to check your current home page or a new page you’re designing. Sometimes design pushes out what’s really important or clients want to jam so much on the front page, they render their website ineffective.
This might be a slick way to really evaluate what’s on the home page.
First, Fleming took a screen shot of the page:
And defined the content into wire-frames:
Here were his findings:
The one news item visible on my 1920×1280 screen is half a headline; the bottom half is obscured.
My content window is 1165×962 pixels. Measuring generously, 284×22 are devoted to news. That’s half a percent for content, 99.5% other stuff.
Ha!
On a serious note, this really gives you an awesome visual of how the elements break down.
What do you think? An effective technique?
[via Academic VC]
Dustin W. Stout says
I like this… I think I will start to take it into consideration on all the sites I build!
Eric Dye says
😀
Dustin W. Stout says
BTW… who is Stephen Flemming?
Eric Dye says
via
Mark says
I geel convicted by this from letting the church site get a bit like this but then not so convicted knowing that I am rediseigning as we speak!
Funny how over time the content can make a mess of things
Eric Dye says
This is so true, Mark!
(I better go check some of my sites, now!)
Charles Specht says
I love this graphic.
This is really the reason I stay away from “most” news-related websites. There’s just too much going on and I get frustrated and leave…and never go back!
Eric Dye says
News? I don’t see any news — “click”
Ruben Nuñez says
Yes, exactly! If I want to view nothing but ads I would watch network TV.
Eric Dye says
LOL!
alex says
Interesting, but the problem is always the same : there are 2 sort of people when it come to web design :
1. the designers/the artists/ etc, people who want to have clean pages/clean information display, etc, nice looking pages and good user experience pages, etc
Most of the time, the websites that these people like and sometimes get to design do not generate a lot of revenues. They are nice lookin websites with a good user experience, but most of the time with bad business model, and thus they are not viable on the long run.
98% of super cool looking startup websites will ***not be there anymore*** in 2 or 3 years from now. they will just die, cuz no money come in, or so little. That’s just a fact.
2. the other kind of people are the ones that are truly making money. All those ugly websites with ads everywhere have been there for years…. 3, 4, 5.. and some 10 years.. and they are still running and growing and generating trafic and money… and because they generate money (-> ADS are often more important that the information), well, they are still in the run.
Eric Dye says
Balance? I think so.
Phillr says
The colour coded breakdown is a technique I have been using for a while. Add a pie chart of the areas to this and you have an effective tool for evaluating space usage on a website. Clients love it!
Eric Dye says
Pie chart — I like it!
(And pie. I like pie.)