Good or Bad Design

While we are focused primarily on the journalistic side of convergence journalism, design is also extremely important.  Just as the nut graf hooks a reader into reading the rest of your story, the layout of the website must be pleasing to the reader's eye.  This means it cannot be cluttered,and it must have an easy-to-navigate layout.  When I am surfing the web, I am more inclined to stay on a site if it is simple and symmetrical.  There are many sites out there that just try to do too much.  The result is the site is too difficult to read and not worth the reader's time.  Internet users can easily go to another site to get the information they are looking for, so it is important that the website you want the reader to stay at is pleasing to the eye.