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Spot the difference

Tuesday, February 6th, 2007

Andrew Weaver

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The Times, along with The Telegraph and The Guardian are three of the top four visited UK newspaper websites (along with The Sun which the others would argue cater for a different browsing market).

In the last 12 months all three have begun major redesigns. 

The Telegraph was the first to show their hand last May, followed by The Guardian’s Travel site later in the year. Yesterday’s launch by The Times completed the set and it is striking to see the similarities that the 3 groups have - almost certainly accidentally - achieved.

All have gone for a larger page width, with strong use of whitespace and grids. A prominent lead image focuses the attention on the main article and the use of advertising seems to have been reduced (or at least its appearance is less obvious). Content-wise there seems to have been a push to provide parts of the site to encourage users to contribute, and the prevalence of multimedia has increased.

All 3 designs are atrractive and effective, and with their white, strongly gridded design owe a nod towards their paper-based heritage. One interesting thing to see how that these 3 UK online news sources have taken their designs away from the style of the number one source, the BBC.

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