In-Text Ads – Ensuring Contextual Appropriateness

The Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled, “Is It News…or Is It an Ad? ” yesterday about the appearance of in-text ads on major news sites.  In-text ads appear as an underlined key word or phrase within an actual article.  If a user mouses-over it, an advertisement related to that phrase appears as a layer above the content,...

Editor and Publisher Gives Newspaper Websites a B-

Steve Outing from Editor and Publisher wrote a good column yesterday about the progress newspapers have made in transitioning to online strategies.  He gave the industry a B- for their transition efforts thus far.

Here is a quick summary of his main criticisms of newspaper websites, all of which I agree with:

• Not enough are using video. 
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Taking at Look at the New York Times Most Popular Feature

Jeff Jarvis points to an interesting post by Chris Riley that compares the editor-controlled content on the BBC homepage to the content on the BBC Most Popular Now page, which is determined by usage patterns of site visitors. He found editors and users were in synch in the stories they chose 37% of the time....

Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project Revamps its Online Program

On Friday, our pro-bono client the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project (MAIP) launched a redesigned and revamped version of its website, www.exonerate.org.  MAIP is a member of a network of non-profits around the country that works to provide legal services for people wrongly imprisoned for crimes they did not commit.  The Project uses DNA evidence to exonerate and clear the names of people that are victims of shortcomings of the US judicial system. ...

Redesigning USA Today

As a designer, I’ve struggled as how to best contribute to our blog. Most web design articles speak to people who aren’t designers and tend to focus on the obvious. I don’t intend to add to that.

So I decided to attempt a redesign of the USA Today homepage as companion piece to our recommendations to the newspaper industry....