Laying it out with the Hyper Local Sites

Laying it out with the Hyper Local Sites

After being intruded in class to Hyper Local news sites like the New Haven Independent I began to think about how these sites are formatted in how they compare to each other. Using the New haven Independent as a starting point I decided to take a look at the Chi Town Daily News and the Voice of San Diego.

I noticed that all three structure there main page differently. The New Haven Independent has paragraph long blurbs about there stories on the main page including pictures with links that take you into the stories. To the right of this they have links to their sponsors and to the left an Extra Extra column and to the left of that links to important sites in the new haven area including other papers.

The Chi Town Daily News seems to have a very different format on its front page. To left center of the top of the page they placed a Photo Gallery but the funny thing is that they do not tell you what the photograph is in relationship to. They don’t tell you what the story is behind it. The rest of the main page is broken up into categories for example breaking news sports or culture. In these areas they give you titles for stories but nothing else, so a reader like has little idea if they actually want to read the article.

The Voice of San Diego has a beautiful layout on the front page. Everything about it screams professional news paper, including the fact that they use a similar font to that of the New York Times. Similar to the Chi Town Daily News in the fact that they separate story by category it differs in the fact that it gives a small blurb about what the article is about similar to The Independent. I also thought that they intelligently placed pictures and promotional material and loved that they has a section on the main page devoted completely to Hot Topics in the San Diego area.

Leaving the main page and going to the articles themselves the Voice of San Diego post the articles listed as Top Stories with no pictures or anything on the page to grab the reader’s eye. This is disappointing to me after such a well placed main page to have a dull article page. Nothing keeps me interested in what the writer has to say. Now granted as I continued to check out articles and some included photographs, but how do you call something a top story and then not grab the reader’s eye visually. The Chi Town Daily news ended up being similar, about half of there stories had photographs and even those that did were not very stimulating.

The New Haven Independent5 however I thought was brilliant with there understanding of how to visually capture a reader. Stories at the Independent sometimes even had two or three photographs for articles which helped lead the article visually. Also photo’s on the site seems to have a depth with most including foreground, middle ground, and background. They also leave room for comments at the end of the article so that readers can see how other reader’s responded directly to that article.

Between the three I think that the Chi Town Daily News is the weakest. Visually poor in nature it did little to captivate me to the site. However I do like both the Voice of San Diego and the New Haven Independent. Do to layout of their sites they both seemed to have a way of keeping me at the site looking for more information.