Research on second ancillary- Newspaper website

My second ancillary is going to be two hyperlinked pages for my newspaper. I have been doing my research on this; I went and analyzed different newspaper websites to give me a deeper understanding on how the website looks as well as to explore its forms and conventions. I looked at quite a lot of different websites; however I decided to focus on two websites which are: London Evening Standard  http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard and South London Press  http://www.southlondonpress.co.uk/ .

The ‘London Evening Standard’ website has a white and orange colour scheme, which represents the newspaper’s identity as the colours used for their logos are similar to their website; white background, black texts and orange block of line. These are some examples of their newspaper posters as you can see the colour scheme again remains similar.

As you can see from the print screen picture of their website they have links to different pages such as; news, business, money, sport, video, entertainment, travel, games etc. The page looks user friendly as the layout looks nice and clean, the articles are clear and easily accessible.  The titles of the articles are eye catching as the fonts are in blue while the rest of the texts are in black. They also take advantage of different kind of medias as they add videos, soundtracks and pictures on the page. There are obviously adverts the company obviously needs to produce profits and banner ads in headers can be one way of their source of income.

South London Press and The Evening Standard are similar in terms of the common colour white for the page background with black texts and using blue for the headlines to make it easier for the readers to identify the main topics. Their colour scheme is blue and white as most boroughs in South are associated with colour blue (such as boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark for example). Both newspaper website has the articles in the middle of the page and adverts on the right side of it. Both shows a lot of advertisements however, this seems to be normal as it is one of newspaper's conventions to feature as much ads. In addition, both page colour schemes complements their ‘hard’ copy of newspaper.

Overall, I realized that most newspaper websites use dark text on a white background and I found out the reason for this; it's because these websites contain a huge volume of content and the page should be readable therefore black text and white background are the most common combination. In addition, a lot of news website tend to use blue and red colour for texts; blue is very common for headlines, titles, articles and even links while red is often used sparingly as an accent color. I now have a better understanding on how newspaper websites are, it's composition and conventions. I now feel more confident in creating my own website I will be doing this on Dreamweaver. 

This picture explains how online journalism is continually evolving in terms of its layouts and choices on the page. As you can see, few years ago it completely looks simple and straight forward. The banner is on the top as usual but the article took up most of the page and adverts on one side and at the bottom ( just how I will position my adverts because I think this idea looks good and effective as it has been a convention for websites which I want to follow). In contrast, we can clearly see on the picture that today newspaper website has advertisements all over the page. For instance in this example; there are ads at the top bottom and side which takes up most of the spaces on the page.