National News - NPR

When looking for a site to choose for this blog assignment I settled on the NPR (National Public Radio) website. Having glanced at a few other sites before coming to this one, I notice that most of the national news websites basically have the same layout design (this one included). There is a header with the logo on the top left, a navigation bar under the header, a side bar with sub-category links, and snippets of articles and headlines on the rest of the page.

The color palette is basic with white, light and dark blue, and gray as the color scheme. Considering it's a news website, I suppose these colors give a serious air to it, but personally I think it comes off as kind of cold and impersonal.

The home page is content heavy and I find that my eye gets lost even when I'm not skimming the page. The page is also long from all the headlines and links, but taking into account the fact that it is a news site and all, I guess that's the only way to get every bit of news on there. I noticed that there's only one drop down menu out of all the links on the page, but when you click one of the side links, sub links appear below it. I think this is a good way to not make a mess of the nav bar by having a drop out menu obscuring the text of the articles.

There really isn't much to talk about with this site; every page has the same ldesign, but it doesn't need to be flashy to present the news. In fact, if it was flashy it probably would be thought of as a big joke, so I guess in this case bland is good.