Choose an ad campaign, design piece or Web site your don't like. Why?

Site: http://mdjonline.com

Newspaper Web sites strive to be a portal for the community they serve; the papers want readers to come to their site first to find out what's going on down the street and in the world around them. What fills up 30-plus pages of broadsheet newsprint must be retooled and presented in a way that is accessible to all types of readers, from those seeking national and international headlines to sports fans, entertainment buffs and political junkies. Which is why it boggles the mind that a Web site would contain barriers preventing readers from efficiently reaching the content.

The Marietta Daily Journal is a 17,500-circulation daily newspaper serving Marietta, Ga., just outside of Atlanta. Their printed page design desk is home to many alumni of The Red & Black, the student newspaper for my alma mater. Their Web site, however, breaks a few cardinal sins.

The index page of the site contains very little: The masthead for the Web site, colored buttons corresponding to the different sections offered, and a Javascript photo slideshow. The slideshow is interesting, and it showcases some very pretty photos, but it stops just short of its intended function. The photos have no cutline information apart from the less-than-helpful alt-text "photo1 photo1", and clicking on each image leads... nowhere. If one were interested in the story behind a photo, one would have to delve deeper into the site to find it manually. A page like this would be useful if it offered readers a choice between high-bandwidth and low-bandwidth versions of the site. But the links featured here are available in clearly-labeled forms in other parts of the site. The splash page just forces another click to get to the actual content.

Each page contains between five to 10 advertisements at the top and right-hand side of the screen. Their position is fine; it's very clear that they are separate from the editorial content in the middle. But most of them seem to be animated .gifs, and at regular intervals they peel, wipe, sweep and starburst between frames. It comes across not only as cheesy but as extremely distracting. It's difficult to focus on the text of a story with all that constant motion going on in one's peripheral vision. Even rendering the ads so that they would animate without the corny effects would greatly reduce their intrusiveness.

Mdjonline.com takes a page from USA Today in their use of color as a branding tool for each section of the paper (a trend, incidentally, which is not carried over in the printed product). The rainbow array of buttons is bright and eye catching but not necessarily well-applied. "Classified" appears as a purple button at the top but as a red banner on the actual Classified page. The section titles in the left navigation rail are presented as white text on a striped, gradient background, which makes the leftmost letters difficult to see. There is also very little contrast on the subsections heads in the main rail, making them all but impossible to read. The topmost banner attempts to create a rounded corner effect, but the mismatched background colors only makes it look amateurish.

Overall, the Marietta Daily Journal's Web site suffers from a lack of cohesiveness combined with gimmicky presentation which belie it's status as a respectable news organization. The design decisions only serve to frustrate the reader in their news-gathering endeavor.

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