Printed Matters

This is the last in a series of posts all this week taking a hard look at the websites of the four major Toronto dailies. Today we look at canoe.ca’s flagship, the Toronto Sun.

The Toronto Sun’s website gets the Most Ugly award. Basically, it’s a set of rectangular blocks stacked one upon the other, but they don’t even fit together! The content area is perceptibly and irritatingly wider than the header and ad blocks above it. The whole thing gives the impression of a ziggurat.

And look at that image-based menu where one tab, the Services tab, looks like its raised (as in that’s the section you’re in) but you can’t even click on it. So 90’s.

And the huge area of white space near the bottom is appealing…not.

But, we’re not here to be design critics, which is a subjective art. On the good side, the Sun’s home page has the fewest links (120, which is almost in the realm of usable) of any of our four study subjects, and the second-fewest validation errors (only 163). At least they didn’t have the hubris to put a fancy XHTML DocType at the top, and then not bother following it. In fact they have no DocType at all.

Onward. The site is part of the canoe.ca network and appears to be running on a ColdFusion platform.

Full stop: no RSS feeds, and no story comments. Wrong century, guys. You fail.

Overall mark: F.