Possibly The Crappiest News Page Design Ever

I'd say it comes pretty close to "crappiest page design" considering the size of NBC. Here are some of the problems:

- Two search boxes which look completely different but (possibly?) do the same thing - Text sizing is all over the place - Inconsistent capitalisation ("category. tags" and "Read. Posts", "jay leno" and "Jay Leno") - Inconsistent punctuation (does the section heading "Most. Recent Posts" make any sense at all?) - Only some of the story descriptions work (in some cases the text is wrapped inside CDATA sections and all that is displayed is an ellipsis in place of the description) - Corny background gradient cuts off before the end of the page - Tags are completely abused (they have "Jimmy Fallon", "jimmyfallon", "Late Night" and "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon") - The "Most. Recent Posts" section has exactly the same content as the body of the page

Any self-respecting corporation should be able to do better than that.

Yeah, I think the saving grace is that it's actually fast, unlike 90% of corporate-y websites these days.

> "But it works"

No it does not. It fails on the following points:

1. Readability: Both headings and excertp text have the same colour. This creates uncertainty about what is what. Same applies to the various other page elements like the tag cloud.

2. Readability: Contrast ratios. This is for many a subjective matter, but displays are very capable of displaying black text on a white background. If you want to decrease glare, you should make the text lighter (#333 is popular) but not the background darker. Tis decreases readability on many devices, especially with LCD displays.

3. Readability: White space and liune height. On the left, there's a overly generous amount of white space. This is not bad, but it fails horribly when in the right column the white space is not considered at all. This gives the page a messy, chaotic look.

4. Readbility: CAPITALS. This has already been discussed above, but I'd like to recap. Captials are considered shouting in online written text. Capitals decrease readability by making all characters similar in size, therefor creating less visual anchors for the reader to attach to. This leads to losing the thread of the sentence. This, by the way, is also why there are special titling and/or all-capital fonts included in typefaces.

5. Readability: Dots in titles. That's not how you write 'READ. POSTS'.

6. Visual consistency: Page elements seem to have no, or very little relationship to each other. Normally this is conveyed through colour, contrast, size and shape. Many parts of this page fail in at least 3 of these, severly degrading the usability of the site as an interactive application.

7. Usability: There is almost no visual feedback for the interactivity besides the hand-cursor. This is bad for usability.

8. Usability: Aggresive social media sahring pop-up. The very sensitive pop-up menu makes using the other links hard.

My conclusion must be that this page was designed by either a programmer or a print designer. I lean towards programmer because of the colour scheme.

So, no, it does not 'work'. It's quite possibly the worst newslisting I've seen, and I thought Reddit was bad.

Well I'd say the same thing about Notch's 0x10c -- that there are many games on the Internet, why is this one newsworthy? -- but I think in both cases it comes down to the reputation of the person providing it. In the one case it is a promising idea from someone who has the resources to make great ideas happen; in the other it is a pile of utter crap from someone who had the resources to do much, much better.

Agreed and flagged.

The public link under /news-sports/ isn't much different either. Perhaps even worse with all the flash embeds under each headline.

I am willing to bet not a lot of people use NBC Sports as their source of online sports news consumption.

EDIT: Actually it is public, as zedr pointed out.

It is.

"News & Sports" -> "NBC Entertainment News"