Being a former newspaper reporter, I have little experience designing a website.  Newsrooms today tend to be segregated: content-creators, or reporters and writers, get to go out in the field and come up with stories to write, but later,they and their editors have no say in where the stories show up on the website. This is done by tech people who may or may not have backgrounds as reporters, photographers or assignment editors. (I believe this will change as more journalists become tech people.)

This might account for the dearth in tips on website design in the latest books on multimedia and online journalism. High school journalists, on the other hand, not only have to learn to become proficient in multimedia journalism and social networking, they also have to in many cases build the website.

Here are some tips I learned over the weekend catching up on web design via usability expert Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think.

You want the site to make readers think as little as possible. Make links obvious, searches painless and page titles self-explanatory. Even a second of internal debate about whether a button will take you to a story or having to decipher “Quick search” versus the simple “Search” can turn readers off.

Home pages have a lot to accomplish. Right off, the site’s identity (in the top left corner) and explanation of its purpose should tell readers exactly what they will find on the site. Home page should also have search box, clear site hierarchy showing available content and features, teases to stories within the site, fresh content to show the site is updated regularly, shortcuts to the most read content, a clear entry-point for where readers should start… Whew! And all this stuff has to be easy to find.

Test the site. Companies pay big bucks for usability tests, where they record average people trying to navigate the site. This would be a great activity for the web designer and editors to do every semester with student volunteers. Krug gives step-by-step directions on how to do this.

The book is geared toward corporate websites, but if students could master the techniques in the book to make websites more user-friendly, their sites would be more enticing than a lot of professional ones out there.  Now excuse me while I go work on this site and my professional writing website to incorporate some of this stuff.