Infatisari

For the next summer I plan to find an internship in Chicago. With this in mind I started to look at the web sites of the newspapers from the Chicago area. From the ones I saw I selected the web site of Chicago Tribune for my review. I think this web site was the cleanest in terms of layout. It provides information in an organized manner and takes advantage of all the new “gadgets” available on the Internet.

On the main page it is clear what the main news is, without to much trouble of reading trough ads or menus. I enjoyed their navigation bar that allows you to access each category of news. This makes the navigation to what I want easier. I was surprised to find that under some subcategories part of the navigation bar was gone. For example in the Entrainment/ Tv trough Theater, the to half of the navigation bar was gone. I think this is because the posts act as blog posts. Also, once I entered Metromix from the navigation bar I was in a totally new page, whit only the back button to return to the main page.

For me it was interesting to see how Chicago Tribune deals with multimedia. On the navigation bar there are two sections Video and Photos. Under Photos one can find multimedia, as we tend to know: soundslides, video stills and sound as a package and so on. I was surprised that under video a lot of the footage was from a TV station and some of the videos where actually multimedia pieces you where directed from the Photos page. I felt that the multimedia section was not organized as well as the rest of the navigation.

I enjoyed the overall interactivity the web site provides. Comments, instant links to facebook, blogs or other networking web sites are always a plus. The share link on the articles offers a connection to the most popular services on the web. Another good feature from my perspective is the one that allows changing the size of the text on some of the articles. There are many other things that I want to refer to but I have to finish. Overall I had a good time browsing trough Chicago Tribune web site. I will be a returning visitor.