DevWebPro

Question: I am an avid reader of Website Notes newsletter. We have a very heavily visited website of Pakistan's national daily. The design of the web site is very lifeless and disorganized (please have a look at http://www.jang.com.pk). The problem is that this page is gateway to two newspapers websites one out of them is in English while the other in Urdu (local) language.

Could you give your suggestions (some URLs or your own comments) on how can we make this home page more attractive, user-friendly, comprehensive yet compact; and meaningful. We also need to have latest news update ticker in both languages (it's a demand) and a lot of stuff that's available on the website but is not presented on the home page.

- Asif Lateef

Jamie's Answer: The fact that you have two languages on one site complicates things considerably. You need to separate the English info from the Urdu info as much as possible.

Instead of mixing everything together, you could split the main page in half and devote one side to the English paper and the other side to the Urdu paper. You are doing this to some degree right now, but the split is not nearly clean enough. I would go so far as to cut out the center section entirely and literally divide the page in half with a vertical line.

Probably a better option would be to use this main page as more of a splash page to get visitors between two options--one newspaper or the other. Right now, you have a lot of links to various sections of each newspaper, but they all go to outside sites that look completely different. The relationship between the links is not clear at all. This is quite confusing. So instead of including all those links on this home page, just have two links--one to a separate site for each newspaper (within each of the two separate sites, the design should be consistent on all pages). Visitors can navigate their own path through the sites from there. If you take this advice, it will mean a complete transformation in the design and focus of your home page, but it will be far more simple and easy to understand.

Final suggestion: Get rid of some of the ads. I know these are important for revenue, but you have 19 images that are either actual ads or that look like ads. This is simply too much. It makes your page look extremely cluttered and disorganized, especially since half the ads are animated. You should not have more than four ads on any given page.

Overall, focus on simplifying. Your visitors will appreciate it!