News24.com

Another week, another sloppy local website attempt. This time, it's the new freshly-baked 1-day old News24.com website that fails miserably to live up to international standards.

A very possible reason could be that they fall under the M-Web banner, who have shown in the past just how incapable they are of producing usable websites (see the list for further reading). But in all likelihood, they just didn't bother to spend enough time researching, and developing with the new technologies available. Their application of HTML is so outdated and IE-specific, you could be forgiven if you thought the site is 5 years old. Visit the site in a Gecko browser or even Opera, and you'll notice it fails to display elements visible under IE.

What I'd love to see is news websites following Wired News' example, which makes perfect use of standards compliant XHTML & CSS to produce a fluid (100% width, easily adjustable), quick-loading and accessible layout. Just to compare, News.com's homepage filesize is 56kb (HTML only) while Wired's homepage is a mere 26kb.

Wake up, I say!

Some political satire from Laura, most probably doing the rounds. Funny stuff!

UPDATE: The Best Designed News Sites by Anne Conneen.