If you could change one thing with pe.com, what would it be?
• Ads are eroding the experience. Focus on high impact inventory with fewer competing ads and alternatives to display. The goal is higher revenue and a better experience.
• Need to design beyond news. Give users indispensable tools for their daily routine and provide context beyond the news cycle.
• The site lacks a voice. You live in your community. Your site should look and sound local.
• Local news seems to be your core asset. Provide a local filter on everything. Allow passive and active customization for better relevance.
• The navigation and taxonomy are confusing. By housing everything, you showcase nothing. Decrease top navigation by increasing in-page navigation.
1. Top half is really busy. Ads above and below header image are way too distracting, so the name of the site isn't immediately evident.
2. Ad right above navigation bar is confusing and makes me think the nav bar is part of it.
3. Titles and images aren't arranged right. I thought the title to the article of the main image was the one to the right.
4. Trim down on those lists of breaking and local news stories and bring some of the other categorical content up. Sports/photos/videos/etc are way down below.
5. The 3 column structure is too cluttered. Either give it more white space, or cut it down to 2 with the sidebar composed of mini-sections. Right now the main story does not stand out.
6. Reduce overall number of stories on each page. My eyes are darting all over.
7. Ajax, gradients, rounded corners, openid, CSS4, node.js.
The home page "feels" very heavy — it takes a long time to load, and inspecting it via Google Chrome Developer tools there's several scripts which fail to load entirely. I'd challenge whether you absolutely need TinyMCE for example on your homepage, and any of the associated scripts.
A lot of the yahoo yieldmanager javascript (if it's needed at all) should be pushed into a separate cacheable file.
There's a mix of relative URLs and complete URLs, I'd strip out the repeated http://www.pe.com/ as much as possible.
If you are asking such a general question I suspect you might not be doing enough measurement.
You can try Google Page Speed for some optimization suggestions but you're not doing badly, except for serving unscaled images (ouch). I'd fix that at least. https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/#url=www.pe.com&...
I have only been in the industry a few years, but most newspaper websites that I come across do the same thing. We product 80-100 new pieces of content per day and it is very challenging to create a design that works.
About our Audience: Our audience is the 5 million residents in the Riverside, CA area. As we are right next to Los Angeles, we do not have dedicated local TV news. There are 13 other newspapers in our market, including the LA Times.
About 30% of our audience accounts for 80% of our uniques & page views. Traffic picks up around 9 and peaks around lunch.
We have seen one trend: Homepage -> article -> homepage -> article etc for the 'top stories'
1. Give more "room" for the content to breath, this improves legibility, specially at the home page where the reader is more likely to skim the content. Move unrelated content further away.
2. Follow a grid, and have all content block following the same margins. Most are uneven and that makes it hard to understand which things are related, and which aren't.
3. Improve typography. Use consistent styles for all your titles and body text. Assign consistent sizes and line-spacing.
I did like the cleanliness of your general homepage layout however. I found it very easy to rest my eyes on your major news stories almost flowing 'naturally'.
You should get better brand recognition and more registrations/logins.