March 2009 Archives

The first thing I noticed when I looked at the Setonian Online mock-up was the heading, and I loved it. I don't know whether it was the bold lettering or the angry Griffin glaring in the background, but it definitely caught my eye. Having said that, I'm not sure that's always the best thing...it's more important for the news to catch the reader's eye, rather than the title of the publication.

I would love to see some of the headlines on the page be bold like this. Something flashy would definitely grab our readers' attentions better, but too much flash would probably be detrimental as well.

As for the layout of the mock-up, I'm really not a fan of the whole three-columns-the-whole-way-to-the-bottom look. I guess I could blame what little experience I have with layout...but I think I would like it better if it actually looked like a newspaper. The way it looks now does resemble a newspaper significantly, but I think it would be better if we had more diverse columns. For example, maybe the three columns could go halfway down the page, and then we could switch to two...or maybe we could just put the gaming section at the bottom...after all, if our readers ended up only visiting our site for the games (which in all likeliness could definitely happen), at least they would be forced to take a glance at the rest of the page...

As for some of the other things about the page, I liked that there were links for the different sections in multiple locations, but I felt like the ones directly below the Setonian headline were rather bland...not to mention an entirely different font from the rest of the mock-up...

With all of this in mind, I have to say that if we put a little work into it, I'm sure we could produce something similar to this site if we really wanted to. I'm not saying this design is perfect, but I do like the direction it is going in.