Most readers judge the professionalism of the website by its page navigation and layout. A News website typically contains several distinct areas on its Home Page. Below the head banner is a main menu which includes links to each of the primary news topic categories. Below the main menu is a “featured articles” area that can contain the latest news from any of the actual topic categories. Below the Features articles area are the Topic category areas with the latest news article in each topic category. A good example is the Los Angeles Times website which has more than a million visitors a day! Here is their header and main menu with a nicely displayed single lead article with a single line above it:
Below the lead story, they have three “featured” stories with images. Note that there is no READ MORE link as everyone now knows to just click on the image or intro text to go to the story:
Below this are four “Featured” stories without images:
The point to these featured stories is that they can come from any topic category. But eventually, they should be removed from the top features articles section and still remain in their assigned topic category pages.
Below this Featured articles section are rows showing the Latest News from a series of Topic categories beginning with a topic called Politics followed by a Topic category called Word and Nation:
Some of the categories use horizontal arrangements with text to the right of the image rather than vertical arrangements with the text below the image.
The horizontal arrangement can lead to wasted white space. But it helps provide variety to the page layout.
Linking the latest Topic Articles to a Topic page with all of the articles in that category
Huffington Post has a specific link to the Topic page:
Some News websites use a two column arrangement with images to the right of the Title and Description. Here is the Washington Examiner Latest News section:
These five featured articles are followed by 6 two column rows with 12 more featured stories.
The above Featured articles section is followed by several Topic Category areas. Here is their Topic Category Justice Latest News layout. Note the link at the top right of this category to continue to the Topic category:
The National Review has a topic for Transgender Ideology
Click View More to go to this page which has a series of articles each in a horizontal arrangement with images on the left and titles and text on the right:
The Washington Times uses the same layout for Topic areas but without any descriptions – just the titles:
The Gateway Pundit placed Featured labels and their logo at the bottom of Featured Images
Sadly, the Gateway Pundit is a Wordpress site with 90,000 articles all on the same page:
This is one of several huge drawback of using Wordpress – the Home page eventually turns into a 4,000 page mess – plus there is a huge risk of hackers taking over and taking down your News website.
What’s Next?
There are also challenges of using Joomla for a News website. The biggest is that while Joomla does a great job of keeping your articles well organized into Topic categories, it does not to a great job of displaying Featured articles on the News Home page. We will need to do a significant amount of customization to get the display of the Joomla Home page to look like the Los Angeles Times Home page. That process will be the topic of our next article.