Welcome to my personal website. Here you will find a sampling of my newspaper writing and see an example of my website design abilities As a writer for the Grand Valley State University Lanthorn for the previous year, I not only wanted to incorporate my writing from the paper into my site, I thought it would be a challenge to design my own version of the Lanthorn website. The result is the spoof of the Grand Valley Lanthorn site that you have found here.

During the past semester I have taken a course on writing for the web, and I have incorporated many of the principles learned in that course to my personal website. While this site is a spoof of the Lanthorn’s, I have also made a few improvements on the original design to showcase my knowledge of good web design.

The masthead was the first area that I wanted to make a deliberate change. On the Lanthorn site, the top banner ad on the page is three to four times larger than the masthead of the paper. It was apparent that I needed to increase the size of my masthead to ensure visitors knew the purpose of the site immediately.

But even more important than the size of the masthead was the change I made to the tagline of my site. On the Lanthorn’s page, the tagline below the masthead is off to the left and is not clearly associated with the name of the newspaper. I knew it was important to center my tagline below the masthead of my site because when visitors see a phase visually connected to the masthead or title of a website, they read the two items together as a description of the whole page. With the Lanthorn design, this web convention is lost. This is especially important with newspaper sites, which typically do not feature a welcome page or about us page.

The homepage in general of the Lanthorn webpage was something that I really felt I could improve upon for my personal website. The concept of this redesign is best characterized by what web usability author Steve Krug calls billboard design. The idea is that the page should be designed for scanning, not reading.

The first step in my design concept was to create a visual hierarchy, something the Lanthorn design lacked. To show which article was most important on the site, I used only one on the main page as my feature story. The Lanthorn site has as many as 15 stories on the homepage. The rest of the stories are given equal prominence on my site because they are of equal importance.

By drastically lowering the amount of content on the homepage I was able to take away from the busyness associated with the Lanthorn’s homepage and create the sense of levels of importance on my page. This will allow the viewer’s eyes to follow the site in the order that I, as the designer, want it to occur. On the Lanthorn’s homepage, there is too much information competing for attention.

Another significant improvement over the Lanthorn’s site was to make all the clickable links obvious too all viewers. To do this on my page, I used the standard underlined blue text for my links – a common internet convention that nearly every user understands functions as a link. The Lanthorn used standard text for the headlines of articles that was clickable, but did not appear to be so. The split second it takes a user to think about whether or not the headline is clickable, lowers the usability of the site dramatically. Simple concepts such as links should never cause a viewer to think, even for a split second.

Navigation is extremely important when it comes to website usability, therefore I made my personal website very easy to navigate. Every page within my site, with the exception of a link to a previous website I designed, features the masthead. This ensures that visitors will know, on each page of the site, they are still within the Erik Westlund News site. For a familiar and consistent feel, every page features the same ads and tables at the top of the page. With the masthead on each page, a user can always click on it to go immediately back to the homepage – a very important concept in usability.

For the content, I chose a selection of my most newsworthy articles on a variety of topics. I chose four sections for my news site – Government, campus, events, and sports stories – in addition to my main story. Each category features a news article written by me in the last semester. Each article, with the exception of my sports column, features a photograph that accompanied the article in the newspaper. These photographs were used with permission of the Grand Valley Lanthorn and credit is given to the photographer in each caption. I borrowed advertisements from the official websites of Major League Baseball, the Detroit Red Wings and the National Basketball Association.