Analysis of the Kansas City Star’s website

Introduction
The website for the Kansas City Star newspaper can be found at www.kansascity.com. The Kansas City Star is part of the Knight-Ridder group and has the largest circulation of newspapers covering the Kansas City region. According to the Knight-Ridder website, the average weekday circulation for the print paper is over 271,000 and the website is member of the Knight-Ridder Digital (KRD) group which is made up of The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Kansas City Star, The Miami Herald and San Jose Mercury News. The KRD websites average more than 10 million unique visitors every month. According to Knight-Ridder investors report, kansascity.com had a total revenue of $11 million in 2004.

Architecture and navigation
KansasCity.com is a non-linear site, with sections of interest like most newspaper sites. The branching centers around the homepage and the section pages, branching out to individual articles or pages of interest like discussion boards, FAQ pages, and advertising information. Like Lynch and Horton suggest, every page is a self-contained unit, with the degree of effectiveness varying from the homepage and individual article pages,

Content organization
The content is organized into four columns. The far left column is a running list of section and service links (news, sports, entertainment, contact us, advertise, discussion boards, etc). The second column from the left is the widest and is filled with links to stories found in KC Today, the top national stories, jobs, markets, the Oscars, and Q&A with reporters and columnists. The third column from the left is filled with links to articles on the front page of the print paper, local news articles, and sports and business articles. The fourth column is entirely made up of advertising.

Recommendations for improvement of usability
The usability of KansasCity.com is mostly effective. More dramatically different section pages may help these sections establish an identity of their own, like the homepage but unique to their area of content. Most if the problems with this site center around the design and organization of the content, the architecture and navigation are sufficient for a newspaper website.

Recommendations for improvement of design
This does not look like a site that brought in $11 million last year, and is owned by the Knight-Ridder conglomerate. The title banner is overly simplistic with KansasCity.com having the largest font (it seems to be simple Times New Roman) and underneath it and smaller is The Kansas City Star. Since this is the website for the newspaper, it would make sense to have the same banner that the print newspaper uses, and have the newspaper name as the largest font on the page, not KansasCity.com.

Another problem is that there is not a single photograph on the entire page, since this is the website of a major newspaper, the reader expects to see photos. There are small clip art graphics here and there (i.e. a help wanted sign by the link for the classifieds), but they look unprofessional and not at all unique. The background is plain white and entirely made up of title links. The page should be designed around a central graphic that pertains to a main story that is relevant to the Kansas City area.

The white background should be eliminated and shading should be introduced. The shading would also help to separate the sections of the paper, now they all seem to run together and it gives the homepage a cluttered, disorganized appearance. The main text for article links are in red, separated by all-caps, black headers (i.e., LOCAL NEWS, FRONT PAGE, SPORTS). Red is hard to read and is associated with breaking news alerts or elements of the page that the designer wants to attract the reader’s attention to, not the majority of the body text. The text should be in black, and color can be given to the headers to set them off.

The linked article pages are well designed. They look like most online articles, with a title at the top, photographs, and links to other relevant pages. Other than the KansasCity.com banner appearing on every linked page, these are well designed. The section and service links running down the far left column should be stylized and made larger so that they appear to be separate from the main article links.

Recommendations for improvement of organization
The content is poorly organized as it has the most important information in the smaller third column and the secondary information like movie reviews and opinion columns as the first content that the eye is drawn to. This should be reversed, so that the top news stories are in the most prevalent (front and center) space and the secondary information should be in the third, smaller column. To help reduce the cluttered look some article links should be eliminated, not every news story in a section should have a link on the home page. For example the top two sports stories could be given and the rest can be found on the sports homepage. This is how most newspaper sites are set up and readers expect this to be how one is organized.

As a reader I appreciate that all the advertising is in one column on the far right side framing the content. It is unobtrusive, and the eye automatically skips over it. As an advertiser I would not like its placement and the fact that it is presented in the skinny column format.

Results of the learning style test

The learning styles test gave me the following results:

Visual 5

Aural 5

Verbal 13

Physical 8

Logical 7

Social 8

Solitary 14

My learning style test results align fairly well with my view of how I best learn, with solitary learning being my primary learning style closely followed by verbal. I do prefer working on projects by myself rather than in small or large groups. I tend to be a more efficient learner when social interaction is taken out of the equation and I can focus on my own. I do like group work when presenting is involved, but only if the presentation is very scripted and each team member is focusing on a particular point.

I tend to understand concepts and ideas if I can talk them out with an instructor or other class members but I can also function when the interaction is removed and I’m simply reading about it in a book or listening to a lecture with low interaction. The test results reflect this by showing high verbal scores. I was surprised that scoring high in the verbal category shows a tendency toward the person enjoying or doing well with public speaking, and that is not my style at all. I actually hate public speaking and try to avoid it as much as possible.

The physical score interested me because I’m not the type of person that takes things apart or enjoys working with his hands. I do like sports and physical exercise, but have never been interested in tools or building things. Exercise is more of a stress reliever for me, and I have never really associated it with learning.

These results have helped me to realize a good plan of action for my research paper. Since I work well on my own, a project like a research paper is a good one for me. I did learn that bouncing ideas off people about the direction my content is taking would be helpful to me, and I plan on doing that with this project.