News and magazine style layouts follow some specific web design trends. If you are planning to create a theme or web design that follows a system similar to a magazine, here are some tips and considerations you may wish to incorporate in your design.
White or light coloured background
Magazine sites are generally very content heavy, therefore readability is a big issue, therefore using a white or light coloured background is ideal. There are exceptions to this however, the majority of popular magazine websites use white background, so why re-invent the wheel?
Grid Based Layouts
Layouts of new sites are often grid-based. Grids are especially effective in magazine web sites because the designs generally consist of multiple columns. To have consistency with so many columns in a web design is ideal and from using a grid, it will help organise the information.
Typography Design Element
News websites have a lot of content on a page which consist of headers, headlines, images, navigation, lists and advertisements wold overcrowd a website if there were many design elements around it – so why not use these headlines as part of the web design. By using large typography and adjusted spacing, a website design can look more memorable.
Image Thumbnails
Most (if not all) print magazines include pictures into their articles and thumbnails in the contents page so the same should apply to web design. Using thumbnail images to link to an article allows users to quickly understand what an article is about as well as draw attention and interest in it.
The Search Bar
The search bar should be prominent on the website for usability. News and magazine websites have so much content it would be frustrating for a user if they cannot find or control what they read – so put a search bar on the page and make sure it stands out so the user can find it quickly!
Navigation
Plain navigation which links to home, company, about, contact is simple but as there are so many articles consider sorting them into categories to make it easier for the user to access the articles. The uses of horizontal menus with vertical menus will also assist in usability. Horizontal menus are common for primary navigation and vertical menus for primary navigation.
