Positive And Negative Aspects Of Newsweek

Overview and description of newsweek.com

Discuss About the Positive and Negative Aspects of Newsweek?

 The newsweek.com is one of the most important parts of the American media for the last 80 years. The online version of this magazine helps its readers to get the news in different local languages and devices (Newsweek.com).    As the accessibility and design of the online version or the website of newsweek.com depends on different factors and designing or the development methodologies for websites, thus this effects on the readability of the content on the website.

 The following report contributes to the Overview of the site newsweek.com, Identification and elaboration of the main features, positive and negative aspects of the given site and in depth evolution of the website. In addition to that, the relevance with the different RWD principles, advantages and disadvantages of the used software tools for the evaluation is also provided in the different sections of this report.

 The given site is online magazine site which provides different kind of articles related to the different domains. This site have a great home page that helps the users to get an idea about the objective of this site. In addition to that the site is updated almost every day as the content of the pages needs to be updated every day (Smith 2014). The download time for the website is good enough to retain users or visitor to the site. When tested for its download time we found that the home page of the site is loaded in 4.59 seconds as the page size is 1.5MB and is using some efficient technologies to serve the pages. The pages in the site have easy navigation controls for the users to navigate between the different pages (Majid, Kamaruddin and Mansor 2015).  From the home pages the readers can select the region to get the news about that specific region. It provides different sections for the news such as, world news, political news, business, technology, arts and culture, and blogs off different contributors to the site.

 If the design of the webpages of this site is considered then it can be said that, it maintains international standards for the website designing such as use of headings to attract the readers and find out the desired news on the site without going through the content of the whole page (Smith 2014).  In addition to that, this site provides newsletter subscription for the readers so that it can encourage the readers to interact with the interface rather than only reading and going through the news. Contextually it is important to mention that, each page of the site includes enough amount of images that also helps in retaining the readers on the pages of the site. 

 This site utilize dark colored text on a white background. Clearly, as these site contain an immense volume of news text content in which the readability of the users or the visitors is most imperative. Different pages of this site specified in the later parts of this report utilize darker colors for headers or for the body of the page outside the content of the page.

Identification and elaboration of the main features of newsweek.com

Smaller page size with better load time: For this site when we checked for the size of the different pages we found that average size of the pages is between 2MB-2.5MB. As the ideal size for a good web page is lesser than 3 MB, thus we can state that the pages with loading time 3-5 seconds can be effective for a better experience (Majid, Kamaruddin and Mansor 2015).   While considering the website and the web pages, the size of the page matters due to the internet speed and device screen factor. The smaller the document size on a page, the quicker it will load on the browsers on the devices of the individuals who requests it.  

 In addition, individuals do see to what extent a page takes to load on their devices. As indicated by different researchers, a deferral past two seconds can make visitors to leave a page - and for each extra second from that point onward, the rate grows by 5.8%. 

Avoiding the use of tables:  While checking the website we found that none of the tested pages of this site have the table attribute for deterring the layout of the page. This is good for the responsive design of the pages of the site, the reason behind this can be stated as, use of the tables for layout is not necessary in web page designing and the table are responsible for only containing tabular data on the pages (Smith 2014).  On the other hand the pages of this website uses div elements and CSS to create the layout of the pages.

 Use of headings:  Every page of this site were found to use defined headings for every content block. This designing practice is considered as standard as it allows the readers or the visitors and search engines like google to condense the content of webpages faster (Majid, Kamaruddin and Mansor 2015).   Precisely defined headings and sub headings helps in resolving the accessibility issues and are very important for SEO (search engine optimization) of the web pages.

Responsive design:  As the use of the mobile devices are exploding and users are accessing different sites on the go thus it is observed that more than 20% of Google search requests are being performed on a smart device. In the United States and Australia, 25% of visitors just get to the web on using smart devices (such as tablets, and smart phones). In addition to that, 61% of individuals have a superior supposition of brands when they offer a mobile experience from their websites.  In the similar manner, the pages of newsweek.com also provides a better user experience on the smart devices.

Internal links without destination:  While investigating the design and accessibility of the pages of newsweek.com we found that, 198 internal links in different pages have no text that describes their destination.  It is desired that internal inks on every page of the site should consist of text that describes the destination that will help both the readers and search engines to optimize the performance of the site.

Positive and negative aspects of newsweek.com

Non-compliance with the W3C standards:    In addition to that   it is also found that none of the webpages are compliant with the W3C standards (Smith 2014). As there are errors in the code of the pages, it is possible that different browsers may not be able to read, render and load the newsweek.com correctly which results in failure of readability of the content of the pages.

Lack of height and Width attribute:   In some of the pages of news week.com the used images (almost 19.0% images) do not have any defined size by using the HTML tags width and height (Majid, Kamaruddin and Mansor 2015). Even though the above mentioned attributes are considered as optional while designing the webpages, but they are strongly recommended as this tags help different web browsers to  render the web pages more quickly with the specific sizes of the images. 

 As this site is designed in such a way that it provides a consistent view on different screen sizes (tablets, desktop and smart phone devices). In addition to that the use of the navigation bar on the different pages helps the users to get back to any of the pages on the website at any point of time. Moreover the used color scheme used for the fonts and background of webpages is also good as the use of the dark color for the fonts on the white back ground helps the readers to clearly see and read the content on the pages. In addition to that, the block design for the contents is also helpful for the visitors to distinctly identify the different articles on the web page.    

  While viewing different pages of the site it is evident that most of the images are specifically defined with different image tags. This restricts the browsers to starch the images that overlaps on the content of the page. Moreover,   it is also observed that the pages of this site were served with the help of GZIP encoding. This is technique is considered as a good technique   because it reduces the loading time of a web page.

Proper utilization of heading in the design:   In our investigation we found that some of the web pages does not contain precisely defined headings. The H1 heading tag should be used for the most top-level heading on the pages, while H2 for sub-headings and H3 for next sub-headings and so-forth.  The inappropriate use of this standard may lead to confusion of the readers/visitors.

  Thus it is important to ensure that different headings and sub headings are used and defined in a semantically correct way. Therefore it is important to always start with a H1 tag for the content and should be used to summarize the page content. The next tags H2, H3, H4 etc. are meant to summarize and partition different sections of the content in a page.

Better page titles: The page titles are important for the understandability of the objective of the page. In our investigation we found that some of the pages have title with more than 70 words and with repeated words.   As an example when writing the titles for the web pages it is important to keep the specifics in the title of the page.  Like if this is a page about “Basketball news” the title should include some specific keywords and not any generic key word such as “Sports.”

Review by two other participants

An extensive rate of news sites like the newsweek.com additionally utilize blue and red notwithstanding a dim or dark color for the content. Blue is to a great degree regular for features, article titles and connections. Red is regularly utilized sparingly as a complement shading for the background of the websites.

  The Javascript and the other styling components used in this page results into render blocking. Even though this components helps the designers to add visual affects to the appearance of the pages to improve the user experience on the website but it is also considered as a huge time hog when it comes to the execution of the pages.

Each time a user visits a page of newsweek.com, often the browser such as (Chrome, Firefox, and so forth.) requests/pings the web server that is storing the page they are trying visit - for this situation, a site page of newsweek.com site (Majid, Kamaruddin and Mansor 2015). It asks the server send to send the documents containing the requested content for this specific site. The requested content may contain any pictures, and interactive media that exist on that website page.

This user request for content is called a HTTP request.  Using this a web browsers can send a request for a document, and the server sending (or "exchanging") that document to the users browser application.

Once the server gets a HTTP request from a visitor’s browser, the server then responds and conveys the requested document to that web browser. The browser then renders the website page for viewing.

 The problem occurs due to the excessive number of files or media on a page. The web browser needs to make different HTTP requests for each and every file or media on the page of the site. When the site does not have too many documents/media, then it would not take too long to request for and download the content of the website on the browser, but in case of newsweek.com, most of the pages  do have a ton of files/media and style sheets that helps in the rendering of the requested content (Smith 2014). For this specific site the large size of the photographic images are responsible for huge number HTTP requests.

Use of break points for designing:  While designing the responsive web pages it is important to define breakpoints for better user experience.   The designers must define breakpoints for the exact device widths for which the users are targeting like the smart phones and tablets.  It is important as it helps in changing the layout of the pages at predefined points of the site. As an example we can say that having 2 columns for desktop but the design must be done using the one column design framework.

Use of the relative units: The user’s device can be a smart phone, a desktop or anything like this. Thus while considering pixel density for the device screen, this can vary for different devices. Therefore it is important to design the pages with units that are more flexible and work everywhere and almost on every screen (Smith 2014). In this scenario the relative units like percent’s for the designing become feasible to use.  Therefore designing something with 50% width property will help the site to always acquire half screen size. The site efficiently uses this mechanism to provide consistent display on the different devices.

Nested objects:  websites like newsweek.com consist of lot of elements and contents some of which depends on each other and thus would be very difficult to control on the different device screens. In this scenario it is suggested to wrap different elements in different containers that makes the code and the display more understandable for the users with a cleaner and tidy view. Again in this scenario the static units like pixels can help in designing the page (Majid, Kamaruddin and Mansor 2015). In every page of this site we found the use of the nested object that helps in the efficient rendering of the pages. They can be used for the contents that are not to be scaled such as buttons and logos on the pages. 

Flow of the content:  with the varying screen sizes (bigger to smaller),  the content on the web pages acquires  more vertical space  on the display and the other contents  below will be pushed to go down the display  down, this mechanism is  called flow (Smith 2014). With the use of pixels this mechanism can help in providing smooth and enhanced user experience.   

Use of webfonts: The web fonts are considered as a great tool to provide consistent user experience on the different screen size. Only drawback of this tool is as much as it is used on the pages the more time it will take to load on the browsers as the fonts are not with the codes but downloaded each time it is used on the pages (Majid, Kamaruddin and Mansor 2015).

 For assessing the responsive design of the pages of the website “newsweek.com” we have used the google chrome device simulator that is freely available with the chrome web browser.   

 One of the most important advantages of chrome device simulator is it is freely available with the browser whereas the other simulators are licensed and it is important to buy those emulators to use their all the functionalities.   

Another advantage is it provides several type of device simulators to simulate the desired website on them.

 The google chrome device emulator can manage the first two requirements and to render the site on the screen but in case of User Agent it is precise for the specific devices (Majid, Kamaruddin and Mansor 2015).  In order to understand the specific appearance of the website the investigator need to test on the physical device by either owning the gadget or having virtual access to the device

Conclusion

 As the use of the mobile devices are growing exponentially day by day through which most of the users access the websites thus  it is important to design the site in such a way that it provides a consistent view on both desktop and mobile devices with varying screen sizes. In addition to that, the SEO which is important to get more visitors has many variables that effects on the performance of the site. However one of the most effective components includes what number of internal links to the site.  Therefore the use of the responsive design for the website can help the website to pull in connections to this specific site.

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