A look at The Guardian Australia website

The Guardian Australia news website is one of the well designed websites, that offer readers a pleasant online experience and ease of navigating news content.

Some of the strengths include efficient layout, verity of content, use of colour and empty space, fonts and user interaction features. The deep-scrolling homepage offers a wide range of content for various segments of readers. This feature ensures that readers remain on the website until they find an article that they have interest in, rather than having to click and search through the website.

The Guardian offers a wide range of news content from Australia and around the world. Although each is allocated a separate section on the homepage, the location of Australian news comes after headlines, opinion, lifestyle, sports and culture, which can be irrelevant for Australian readers who would naturally be more interested in local news.

The whitespace, on the left and right, allows readers to locate news quickly rather than feeling overwhelmed with content, which may prompt them to leave website and search elsewhere.

The homepage is divided by topics that offer a wide range of news to cater to the interests of various readers. The use of different colours for each section allows the reader to find content of their interest faster. Each news story is highlighted using a different colour that indicates its topic and grouped with similar content. For example, headlines in red, sport news in blue, opinion pieces in orange, lifestyle in pink and so on. This also serves as a break to renew the attention of the readers, as they pause to discover the what each colour segment contains.

The latest and most significant news are placed at the top, in the homepage, and presented in large scale to grab the reader’s attention as soon as they open the website. Currently, the Guardian website has allocated two sections in a similar layout as two major global events are occurring. One is a live blog of the Black Lives Matter protests in the US, followed with a live blog about Coronavirus. Each section is further divided into sub-sections in the form of squares with darker backgrounds that contains articles or updates related to the main topic, along with the time indicating how long ago it was published. Allocating the content in this form allows the reader to locate the news they want to read in seconds, with awareness of the most recent update on the topic.

The section at the end of the homepage titled ‘Most Viewed’, The Guardian offers a list of the top ten viewed news during the day, listed by order from one to ten. This list is updated daily. The most commented and most shared news article are also placed in this section.

This can give an insight into the public’s interests, however it may also place more emphasis on some news or issues compared to other who may deem less valuable to the public. Deflecting attention from important news can be an issue. However, because this section is placed at the end of the homepage rather than the beginning, it may not have a huge impact on the reader’s decision to view stories as they would have had the chance to access all the other news listed above prior to reaching this section.