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Unfortunately, content presentation in entertainment and magazine sites is consistently
marred by the intrusion of banner ads, whose winking, blinking, and blaring colored
boxes interfere with on-screen reading.
News sites
News sites have largely adapted the existing design genres of print newspapers and
magazines to the smaller format of the Web. Virtually all of the design conventions used
on the New York Times Web site derive from well-established print precedents, although
ironically, the New York Times's louder, more colorful Web presence owes more to the
exaggerated visual hierarchies of USA Today than to the Times's conservative print
conventions.
www.nytimes.com
Fortunately, aside from the newspapers themselves, there are excellent resources
available for learning the conventions and terminology of journalistic graphic design. Tim
Harrower's Newspaper Designer's Handbook and other similar books are filled with
useful presentation devices that translate easily to a Web page and have the additional
benefit of being familiar to the news audience.
E-commerce
In e-commerce sites the crucial design parameters are efficient navigation and search,
along with speed to the final "place order" button. During the "dot-com" market bubble
many new e-commerce sites spent fortunes of their investors' money on elaborate
Macromedia Flash or digital video presentations and quickly failed — some went
bankrupt before the site was launched. Meanwhile, the Web's most successful
commerce sites kept things technically simple and basic. Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, and
other successful Web commerce sites use remarkably spare page design schemes and
simple text- or tab-based navigation systems. Another area where e-commerce sites
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