Web designing – News websites suffering from mobile applications boom

Posted by Ben Johnson

November 3, 2011

According to recent updates, the increased rush for creating news applications for the Smartphones is such that the news websites are suffering highly from this. The news websites thus have started to suffer from the advertising clutters that sometimes spread to weird heights. Actually, web design is really in bad shape now.

The state of website designing

According to Frdric Filloux, the general manager of Frances ePresse digital consortium, In the mobile applications boom, news-related websites end up as collateral damage. For graphic designers, the graphics tools and the computer languages used to design apps for tablets and smartphones have unleashed a great deal of creativity. Happily, we just stand at the very beginning of a major evolution in news-related graphic design for apps.

It has been seen that despite the promise that HTML5 offers, improvisation of the design to be used in the news websites and the display advertising, it has not been able to reach any real new heights. The reasons of this are many. One of the reasons is backward compatibility, another is the poor documentation which is resulting in the uncertain development of web designing, and the other is the stability and the various performances issues.

It has been seen that, majority of the daily news websites have become more interested in getting the mobile-friendly layouts as most are being accessed through the cell phones. With the advancement in the smart phone technologies, people use more of their Smartphones than laptops. Though, most of the news websites simply are of low levels which do leave enough room for improvements not only of the content but also of its usability.

There are even many cell phone news websites where the home pages do not even show any form of ads other than a couple or two network-fed ads on the article pages. But, it is also being predicted that with time, this problem is going to lower a lot. The smaller screens that the cell phones have are going to result in fewer ads of greater values.

It is supposed that with time, the U.S. cell phones are going to support much better web browsers juts like the Opera Mini. New sub-$200 e-readers like that of the Kindle Fire and the Kobo Vox may be able to be of some real help for the people and this may help them in crossing the digital divide. This is also going to help in increasing the real good audience for the digital news.

Thus, rather than simply cluttering the news websites with better and increased number of the displayed advertisements, the news organizations with time may even be able to do better in terms of both the news which are provided and the related ads.

Ben Johnson is Alliance Manager at Logoinn, a logo design company. He writes about the effect of design on marketing and brand identity and helps small businesses find design solutions for effective marketing.