Website critique: www.ansa.it

Ansa .it is the website of most important press agency in Italy.

First impressions

The website seems at a first sight quite cluttered and cahotic.

This is because:

• The nameplate is too small and in a odd position (on the left-hand corner) so that it is not immediately recognisable among advertising
• Too space has been dedicated to a banner on the top of the page that catches completely the attention of the reader
• There are at least twenty articles on the homepage without any categorisation, which makes the sites very difficul to read through.
• The typography is very small

The colour scheme is quite simple and coherent, with a good combination of white, green and some parts of text highlighted in grey.

Writing

The majority of the articles don’t follow Jacob Nielsen’s rules:

• The paragraphs are too long and dense, which descorages from going on reading . Each paragraph is about 100 words long without any space beetween sentences.
• There are no sub-headings.
• Bold is extensively used in the text.
• There isn’t any criteria in the presentation of news. On the top of the page there’s an article about national politics close to another one about sport
• There isn’t any hypertext link.

Content

The website is quite rich in terms of multimedia. there are viseos and photographs for most of the articles, but all this material is not displayed in a captivating and neat way.

A  weak point is that there are absolutely no links in the articles, which doesn’t allow the reader to have any possible background or in-depth analysis of the news.

Navigation

The main navigation on the left is consistent and easy to use. The subnavigation however is very confusing. Once you choose a kind of news you want to read about it’s like groping in the dark.

On the whole the website seems not be able to contain appropriately the huge amount of news that, being the website of a press agency, it has to.