Recently, the online magazine Salon changed its design. Now, it exemplifies many common mistakes in organizing and presenting web content.
For starters, try making sense of the front page without getting a headache. A bajillion little boxes, all seemingly placed at random, each of which is supposed to encapsulate some category of content. The problem is, it's not always clear what those categories are. For example, the meaning of TMI and Open Salon are not self-evident. (Hint: One of them leads to blogs. So why not call the link Blogs?)
Second, repetition rules, adding to the confusion. The same story appears in multiple boxes. The tabs at the top of the page repeat some of the categories of little boxes in the middle of the page. (But not all.)
Third, the design forces me to click more often than I should have to. Every time I start reading an article, I hit a couple of paragraphs down labeled Continue reading. But I'm already reading the article, dammit, so why make me click one more time to see the rest of it? (Perhaps because the page isn't visually confusing enough, so the web designers had to cram more article snippets into that space.)
Fourth, there's the confusion of ads. It's not that ads are a vice per se. However, when they're not clearly differentiated from the rest of the content--often because their positioning changes with each page--it takes your brain an extra cycle to separate the ad content from all the rest. Only a few ergs of mental energy necessary, perhaps, but in conjunction with the other design problems, it adds up.
Fifth, juvenile aesthetics. For a magazine that's supposedly pitched at literate news junkies, the graphic message is often, "You're all a bunch of teenage boys at heart." I don't know how many times I've clicked on a page to see someone's bare ass, or snarky photos of ugly people, or titillating headlines like "Mom's First Nude Shoot." None of these items individually is necessarily objectionable, but again, when you add up...
And finally, the layout keeps changing. If the editors are trying to fix the problems with the site, kudos for their good intentions. However, the more they tinker with design, the more confusing it becomes.
Many newspapers and online magazines have embraced many of the same design principles. By which I mean, the same mistakes, such as the random, ugly jumble of "contentlets." Just because The Washington Post jumps off a bridge doesn't mean you have to.