Is this the biggest news paper in the world? It follows that their site feels like a newspaper. That’s not an easy thing to do given the medium. I think they pull it off, in a print sort of way. It is not easy to jam that much content on a page and have it useable.

CBC now sports a massive Flash movie — SEOs breathe deeply — dominating everything above the fold; find it just below a very pedestrian, grey navigation. But under the Flash, scroll another boring 400 pixels or so past the three giant portals, and things start looking up.

BBC takes the cake for functionality and perhaps overall form as well. Feel the iGoogle movable content boxes that you can customize and presumably save to your preference. I really enjoy how smooth it looks, it’s good mix of graphics and text, and how it does not compromise to the cram-it-all-in disease news outlets contracted from their print parents.

They say the best of the (partisan) new… legitimizing the blog news, great; design? not so much. Arianna might pay attention to the nice things some of her new peers are doing for our eyes.

We must get this out of the way as soon as possible. Massive visitation — I could not have done this to you otherwise — equal to its visual let down. The idea here is to focus on the content. Understood. There’s just so much potential here, resource and audience, it’s a shame to give not the slightest nod to the aesthetic.

This is what we should expect from them. This design reflects the class and sterility of the outlet. Imagine you went to PBS/New Hour and found yourself looking at a design like Drudge. The lesson is that the attitude of the design should be acknowledged by its audience.

..the big guy in Canada. It’s narrow, it’s harsh, and it’s clear CTV is still way more concerned with the air waves. Compare their on-air spots with this site to see what I mean. And with the absence of respectable local outlets online, it’s as forgivable as this design from 2002 can be.

Love this header.. very 30 Rock. The content organization is good, and the emphasis on the cover image without compromising too much content real estate makes a lot of sense; this outlet takes real pride in the look of its content, online and off.

Slate does a pretty good job getting you where you need to be, top stories and first rate content. Nice original story art every day, but two very bizarre ad zones at the top right. Slate wins the award for the most absolutely humongous ad space on the web, which is thankfully only seen periodically. 336 x 850! Impressive even when The Economist has it’s new intern Jimmy create the art for it. The page actually refreshes itself eventually and replaces the ad with content; that’s how big this thing is.

That grey navigation had it’s day and then some. Salon redid the right side a while back, and apparently they’ve decided never again to look at that skinny, grey failure, like the rest of us.

Bland, but fair and balanced to be sure

And a fringe site… the world’s premier, niche outlet on this topic… Weapons systems analysts should not design websites!