Am I captain James Cook or what?

A key to any productive webpage is ease of navigation. For news sites this is potentially more critical because of the stiff competition for readership. I decided to view a number of webages and compare how easy it was to find some of the things that I regularly look for when visiting a news webpage.

I chose to look at what I thought would be news leaders in Australia, Britain and USA. I have limited it to a leading broadcaster and newspaper in each location.

The contenders are:

Australia: ABC and The Australian
Britain: BBC and The Times
USA: CNN and New York Times

In the online world all news organisations are equal. Or at least, they start that way. Consumers may originally gravitate towards trusted brands but will quickly shift focus if those sites are hard to navigate.

The newspaper sites are a prime example of a confused understanding of an online presence translating to a difficult to navigate page. The New York Times site is perhaps the best example. It lays out with the traditional print masthead but fails to adopt simple principles of online navigation such as easily understandable and accessible tabs across the top of the home page. While The Times and to a lesser extent The Australian also maintain the traditional print mastheads, they at least have attempted to help the viewer by adopting fairly simplest tab systems on the home page. All three sites though lack a dynamic or interactive feel that offers viewers a point of difference to competitors.

Conversely, the broadcaster sites are instantly more dynamic. They embrace the multimedia nature of the online environment by using more colour and video content on the home page. The ABC site is probably the most simplistic in its layout but the pop-up menus that appear when you hover over the top tabs make it very easy to find your preferred path. BBC and CNN could take a leaf from the ABC site by adding this function to their simplistic top tabs.

RSS feeds are something I look for on all news sites and these sites vary wildly in their access to RSS.

ABC: Very poor in my opinion, not accessible on the home page at all. You need to navigate through the news tab first then scroll to the bottom of the page where the RSS symbol is still not present. 2/10
BBC: Much better than the ABC, still not present on the BBC home page but due to the scope of the organisation that's acceptable. Thankfully when going to the news homepage it is instantly noticeable at the top right hand side of the page clearly marked with the RSS icon. 7/10
CNN: Has the RSS feed on the home page but you need to scroll to the bottom of the page and have a magnifying glass to find it. 4/10
New York Times: Again the feed is at the bottom of the page but at least had the easily recognisable symbol. The site has missed a clear opportunity to place it next to the Twitter and Facebook icons on the top right of the page. 6/10
The Times: See CNN description 4/10
The Australian: A bit of a strange one here. It sits about 2/3rds of the way down the page on the right hand side. They have gone to extreme lengths to offer 12 separate feeds on the home page. In my opinion it's over the top and positioned strangely. Users look at the top then tend to scroll to the bottom so may miss it all together. The inclusion of 12 feeds suggest it's important so why not put a single icon at the top right of the page and people could choose the feeds from a dedicated page. 5/10 (mostly for effort).