As I have been thinking about which websites to select for this post and which of their features push me to select them I have noticed one pattern that will recur in my brief discussion of each individual website: clear sectioning. Some websites, like Slate, I visit often but resent the experience of doing so because they lack this trait. A site like Slate, for instance, is clearly divided in some ways but swerves, and bear in mind as I use this adjective that I am prone to exaggeration, wildly between styles of division and ultimately amounts to what is, for me, a very cluttered experience. I hate clutter. Slate switches from having two columns to three and has frequent interruptions of these columns with various stories formatted in horizontal boxes before switching back to columns again. The headaches. For news, I have a much more pleasant time reading Salon for their clarity of layout.
They have two columns, one with main/highlighted stories, and another with links to articles and areas of their site that are not quite the headlining acts so to speak. They keep this format all the way down the page, but even as you scroll down, as I have in the picture above, their banner (which is attractively thin and sleek) remains at the top of the screen linking to important things and allowing you to search.
The Hairpin pulls a similar trick: having two columns all the ways down, clearly divided from each other and easy to navigate. It loses points for me because it doesn’t repeat the trick of having the banner that stays present even as you scroll down, but gains some of those back from having a really nifty archiving feature. Above each post is a link to the section that the post is filed under. Example files include the future and interviews. Now, it is a bit frustrating that if you click on the file name it treats the first click just as it would if you had clicked on the headline, taking you to the article itself. However, if you click on it again it takes you to a list of articles filed under that topic on an attractive, simple, easy to navigate, and uncluttered site.
Finally, we have thesinglesjukebox, one of my absolute favorite sites. It has a wonderfully simple format, with b
eautiful symmetry. I’m a total sucker for symmetry. It pulls focus on the most important thing, which is reviews of current singles, by placing those in the very middle of the page, under the title and search bar. Then to each side there are various columns linking to internal and external places of relevance. These include links to comments from users, to their reviews of their highest rated singles, to the blogs of the individual contributors, to the websites they like and read themselves, and their archives. A joy to navigate and not overwhelming in the least.