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W E B PA G E S

1 DESIGN & LAYOUTMy design follows the general layout of almost all websites; a navbar at the top, a company name and

logo, with content below it. This is common for almost all websites on the internet because a user is able to immediately navigate to any section of the website, which makes sense for the categories of a news website.

Overall, the design and layout of my webpages are similar to other news websites, although I did not closely follow the design of any other site, rather arriving at the same conclusion through design.

My design was similar to how many modern news sites are pieced together, however my design was different as it contained easily accessible weather, which many other sites did not have, as well as a ‘main article’ with minor articles below it in a vertical hierarchy rather than the somewhat horizontal hierarchy you find in other news websites, with my ‘minor article’ grid being below the main article rather than to the right of it.

This challenged conventions of layout, but the actual things being laid out were more or less the same. In retrospect I think my design was closely related to that of a newspaper, and I was perhaps unconsciously trying to keep the ‘newspaper style’ rather than a wholly web-based design.

In conclusion the design and layout of my web pages were similar to many news sites, but different enough to be distinct in its challenging of conventions, and I believe that this challenging of conventions was effective both in form and function.

CONTENTMy research indicated that readers were interested in a mix between

articles that would appear in the print edition, and articles which are original to the web edition, and this is what I did when constructing my web page. This challenges conventions, as my research found that web editions of regional newspapers often perfectly mirrored their print editions, and this not what I did.

My online news articles(which only consisted of titles) were less news and more lifestyle and non—content stories, which is true of many national newspapers but not regional newspapers. This challenging of conventions will be useful, as online revenues now make up a significant proportion of newspaper revenues as the market shifts in favour of online news.

CONCLUSIONIn both the design and content of my online webpage had significant

differences to most other online regional news webpages, design wise my paper was similar in function, but different simply through layout. Content wise I followed a more national newspaper model in order to follow and keep up to date with online news trends.