Surfing by Design   

What are the keys to successful Web site architecture?

AT THE RISK OF exhausting another staple Internet metaphor, pretend you're opening a restaurant.
One of the most important decisions you'll make is the type of cuisine to serve. That question almost answers itself: What can you cook? Steak or soufflé? Jambalaya or Jamaican?
One of the last and least weighty decisions might be the typeface on your menu.
Somewhere in the middle you'll need to plan the physical layout of the place. If you make really fantastic food, you can count on a small but devoted clientele, even if the space is stuffy and the walls are streaked with grease. But if you want to develop steady business, you'll need to offer a comfortable atmosphere. You want people to drop by because your joint is more welcoming than the one down the street.
Running a news Web site is a lot like that. To a large extent, content is determined by what's in the pantry. A newspaper site will typically contain long-form text articles and databases, while a TV site has better access to video clips and weather radar. And a certain level of traffic is guaranteed by original content: Some visitors will come for exclusive information no matter how ugly it looks.
But repeat traffic brings home the bacon. Online news sites and their advertisers value users who visit regularly for their diet of daily news. With more sites offering the standard fare, presentation becomes critically important in attracting a faithful clientele.
Tradition influences design decisions to some degree. That's probably why cbsnews.com mimics a television screen and washingtonpost.com looks like a newspaper plastered to a computer monitor. TV sites tend to be heavy with color and modular components, while newspaper sites are more text-heavy with conservative coloring.
The top headlines for nytimes.com underscore the New York Times' efforts to maintain a consistent look and feel across mediums. Those headlines are actually graphic images created in the Times' typeface--not simple text links like on most sites. Editor in Chief Richard Meislin says the practice helps Times readers make the transition to the online product. ³We did want to give people some visual clues that they've come to an area with information of the quality they would find in the New York Times,² Meislin says.
Visual clues may be helpful, but some print design principles might not translate to the Web, suggests a study by Stanford University and the Poynter Institute. The Advanced Eye Interpretation Project tracked the eye movements and surfing behaviors of 67 online news consumers from Chicago and St. Petersburg, Florida. Researchers found that viewers entering a site focused on text earlier and more often than photos or graphics--contrary to typical print behavior. The subjects looked directly at 92 percent of the articles on the pages they loaded, compared with 64 percent of the photos and 22 percent of the graphic art. Another surprising finding was that subjects were willing to scroll through a long page to read an article. This belies the conventional wisdom that surfers tend not to look "below the fold" of the initial viewing window.
The methodology was a bit controversial: The report acknowledges critics who have argued that the sample size was limited, and it notes the eye tracking technology didn't measure peripheral vision. Regardless, the study warrants further research.
Whether a site inherits content from a newspaper, a TV station or neither, it faces the challenge of usability. Successful sites share a few key strategies:
First, they present a front page that anticipates and reacts to popular or quirky items (the golfer who impaled himself on his own club) while prioritizing the day's top news stories.
Second, they offer a simple navigation system. There are generally two schools of thought: lay out the entire site map on the front page (á la latimes.com) or offer the major sections up front and let visitors drill down to the subsections (washingtonpost.com). Either strategy works, if complemented by a functional search engine and an easy way to get back to the homepage.
Finally, they choose clarity over cuteness. The catch phrases that succeed in broadcast can seem obscure when applied to navigation buttons.
Is there enough latitude for individuality within such parameters? Certainly. There's also room for experimentation, as Salon.com demonstrated when it recently rescinded a few design changes after visitors raised a ruckus.
Does one medium possess the recipe for success? Not as long as newspapers dominate classifieds, and TV stations own video. Content variety ensures that both can attract faithful followers in today's online marketplace.
As competition heightens, the first cuts will separate sites that master the art of presentation from those that do not.