Website categories

At the top of most newspaper websites, as I have observed, there are several categories in a horizontal strip on which you can click to get the news from that section. In the past, these have commonly been known to be listed down the left hand side of a newspaper, though it has become more fashionable to go with the horizontal look of late, and this is shown with prototypes of Microsoft's new platform 'Windows 8' being released, which revolves around a start menu fundamentally built around the horizontal idea. I will be including this in my own website to meet the conventions of those I have analysed previously.

First is always the 'news' section, which highlights the main stories of the day. This is almost a must in terms of newspaper websites, so I will need to conform to these conventions to please audiences. In terms of colour, while I am at present undecided about the shade of my tabs, I will be looking to follow the convention set by the websites I have analysed by making the news section red.

I also aim to make the tabs correspond with the colour chart/rainbow synchronisation, as it adds to the continuity of the page and is easy on the eye. This is what I observed the 'This is Cornwall' website does, and I liked it a lot.

Secondly, I will have a 'sport' section, which would supposedly bring up a page filled with sport related news. Though nobody voted for sports stories in my newspaper, I think it is imperative I include it because it is such a big part of society. Again, conventionally, the sport section is second or third in the bar, despite being always located at the end of the newspaper itself, where the back page effectively acts as a front page for sport.

Other subjects my study revealed young people were interested in include food, which I will be including in an 'eating out' section, aimed at tourists and people who want to go somewhere to eat. Similarly, politics was a popular topic, for which I will house a separate tab again, where I could write about increased petrol prices among other things. I would integrate national and Cornish politics for a politics page, as I would with the stories and I plan to do this for the newspaper in general.

Also popular were technology stories, which despite everybody's keenness for them, are fairly scarce, as I have discussed on a previous post. Conversely, I want to quote Twitter and Facebook within my articles to keep younger people in touch with my newspaper.

Finally, I have decided to go with Weather, as everybody seems to be raving about it all the time. It is also a key part of a local news website and keeping people in touch with it is vital to becoming successful.