St. Louis Post Dispatch vs. Columbia Tribune

The St. Louis Post Dispatch's website (STLtoday.com) is fairly appealing. It is a little boring with its lack of color, but it is an informational website and fulfills its job well.  The site is well organized and not too cluttered. It has a search box at the top along with list of topics.  I like how the topics stretch horizontally across the screen, but when you move the cursor over them, a drop down box comes and it is a little annoying.  Under the topics is a box that changes pictures between a few hot stories.  To the right of the picture is a box with two tabs, Top headlines and Columns and blogs.  As you scroll down the page, there are more specific stories.  They take the topics from the top of the page and have a little section on each listing top stories, including videos from select stories.  I am most pleased with the fact that the page is not being consumed by ad after ad.  Overall, I like this website a lot.  It is easy to find what you need and looks appealing because it is not overdone.

The Columbia Tribune has no search box at the top and basically consists of four columns.  The first is a navigational list of topics, and the second is of a picture with a ton of top local news stories following.  The third is a long list of AP top stories, and the fourth is today's front page, most visited stories, and Election 2008 information.  In my opinion, this website has way too much information on one page.  It looks very crammed and does not pull out top stories, there are just too many there.  It think the best thing about this website is that the advertisements are not intruding on the information.  They are off to the right or at the bottom of the page.

From evaluating these websites, I have found that the St. Louis Post Dispatch definitely has a better website in comparison to the Columbia Tribune, but when looking for some local Columbia news, this website is the place to go.  It has a lot of information and you can find just about anything that you are looking for.  The St. Louis Post Dispatch is more attractive to viewers and easier to navigate, but they both have information, from local to nation news, so I would say that they both serve their purpose of bringing the news to the people just fine.