It’s time in the Design Review series to take a look at another of the big dogs of the blog world, The Huffington Post. This mega blog reaches “more than 2 million monthly visitors“.

Style:
The Huffington post uses mostly green and white color palette, with a little orange thrown in to spice things up a little. The green tones used work well with the layout, but the orange links aren’t so flattering. While they do make the links highly visible, which is good, I can’t help but think another color would do the job better.

The Huffington home page uses a single major headline, then splits the page into a three column layout similar to Drudge Report. (Not a flattering comparison) Unlike Drudge, Huffington’s page is image rich, sporting 43 images and 4 iframes as of this post. Combine that with numerous other graphical elements, such as vertical column lines, headline underlines, and story separator lines, and it makes it a little cluttered.

Going to the Blog section of the Huffington Post is better, but a bit of a mixed blessing. It changes to a fairly nice two column layout which is an distinct improvement, but it adds advertising in the header, the top of the sidebar, and in the main content column which I find annoying. When I started this review, the ads all three of those locations were active ads with pulsing color and flashing text. Very annoying. I realize advertising is good for websites, but a little restraint would be good, not everything needs to be blinking at the same time.

Negative, or white space is another area where this site has issues. There’s a lot of it, which is good, but it’s use is a little erratic. The right edge of the blog column for instance is quite large. but the text wraps tightly around advertising for instance. The home page too suffers from a lack of consistent use of negative space. Columns are too tight to each other, but stories are nicely spaced. The headline area could actually stand to be tightened up a little, it pushes the main content down the page a little further than I would suggest.

I really like the Quick Read feature they’re using on the home page. It pops up a small excerpt from a story when clicked on, letting you choose to view the whole story if you’d like. A clever idea, well executed.

Structure:
This is a Movable Type based site which should have a nice CSS based layout. Should is the key word there. Oddly, it incorporates a mix of tables and CSS. This is not something I would recommend. I believe a straight CSS layout would be a better choice. A straight table layout would be a lesser choice, but I could see why it would be done. Mixing the two has never seemed like a good idea to me. The results are often inconsistent, and that’s the case here. Most people probably don’t notice, but the navigation bar doesn’t track with the rest of the page in Internet Explorer 7. (It might be the case in version 6 too, but I don’t currently have a working version of that.) In effect, the navigation bar is acting as if it’s left aligned on smaller window sizes in IE7. Once the window enlarges enough to center the bar, it remains centered. Since it is the only element acting this way, it shifts out of alignment as the window size decreases.

Load time is reasonable with 25.11 seconds on DSL or 80.64 seconds on 56K modem. Surprisingly good for a site with a lot of images. Small image size balanced against the high number of images probably accounts for this.

I found the CSS is a little lacking. Not as complete as it should be, and structured a little oddly. Now different web designers lay this out differently, but this seems a little… haphazard. The site uses several style sheets, which I thought was a nice touch, but also uses a fair amount of embedded CSS, which confuses me. Why set everything up with linking style sheets, then embed half of the CSS? A waste of time and effort. If will make the site harder to maintain, and increase the chance of having different appearances on various pages.

Content:
The content of The Huffington Post is more or less what I expected. A lot of writing, all of it on more or less from the same political perspective. This site leans slightly farther left politically than the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler leans right. That’s a long ways. Like most group blogs where the writers share a political viewpoint, this site has become more extreme than most of it’s contributors would have been on their own.

What I would change:
Tone down the advertising in some way. Less animation, or less advertising in general. Three different animated ads above the fold on one page is too much. It’s eye strain waiting to happen.

Clean up the home page, starting with bringing more content above the fold.

Consider some significant structural changes. The mixed table/CSS structure would be replaced by an all CSS layout that would reliable show up in all modern browsers. No more sliding Navigation Bar.

Finish the CSS. It needs to be complete, and linked. The embedded CSS needs to be removed and incorporated into the site wide CSS structure.

Consider slight changes to the color palette. More green, less orange. Consider alternatives to the orange link color. A different shade of orange might be enough.

Clean up the negative space issues. Nice consistent use of white space is one of the keys to readability. This site is currently too inconsistent in it’s negative space use.

Summary:
What should be a nice web site design on a very stable platform. While the platform seems to be working, the design isn’t. Minor modifications to visible styles would make a large improvement. Switching to an all CSS site structure would make a large improvement in cross platform performance. IE would look like Opera and Firefox. My one word summery: disappointing. For how much money Ms. Huffington planned to raise to bring this site to life, it should be something spectacular. It’s more of a yawn.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson’s Website, The Random Yak, Big Dog’s Weblog, Right Truth, basil’s blog, Stuck On Stupid, Conservative Cat, Pursuing Holiness, Rightwing Guy, The HILL Chronicles, stikNstein… has no mercy, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Dumb Ox News, Right Voices, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.