CoPress

On the slate for this week’s session of the summer web design camp was article pages and different approaches to designing them. Thursday I sat down with Daniel, Jake Paul, and Ethan Klapper to talk over some of our favorite practices. Rick Martinez also joined us mid-way to add a fifth voice to the conversation.

To start things off Jake lead us all through a presentation, which we’ve posted on Slideshare, he had made that hit on some of the main points about article pages. A couple of the main points of that presentation were:

• Hierarchy – it’s important to create a clearly distinguishable hierarchy of elements on the page. This needs to be more than just the headline and body text though, it applies to all page elements. Even after scrolling most of the way down a page a reader should still be able to clearly pick out the body text as the defining page element.
• Minimize distractions – the whole point of visiting an article page is to read: don’t make this difficult for your readers. Ads, comments, sharing buttons, etc. are all great to have on an article page, but they should by no means detract from the content that you publish. If it’s too hard to read articles on your site then users will resort to either reading your articles through RSS or not reading them at all.
• Large fonts – 11 point Helvetica may work great for some sites but for long form reading it’s just not ideal. Keep the fonts large and you won’t strain the eyes of your readers.

From there the discussion proceeded to cover some of our favourite and not so favourite article designs. The slideshow linked above contains screenshots of all the sites discussed so that you can follow along with what we were talking about. There’s some good information in there and some of the sites critiqued are The Mustang Daily, The Daily Pennsylvanian, Seed Magazine, The Nation, The New York Times, and more.

This week we’ll be covering a topic that has been discussed quite a bit: integrating a wiki into your news organization website. Daniel and Will Davis will be leading the session and will be giving us some ideas and tips about how to set up and integrate a wiki. If you’re interested in participating you can RSVP to the Facebook event, read more at the wiki and get started drafting a “wiki wish list” in the Forum.