Archiving front pages

Poynter.org does something more sites might want to try: a day-by-day front page archive. A third-party site, the Wayback Machine, can do something like this already, but in-house versions would offer better access speed and finer time resolution (not to mention the ability to serve ads on the page views). ajc.com, where I work now, already archives its home pages for internal use, and I bet many other sites do as well. Writing a simple script to let visitors to navigate to them would be trivial.

As a side note, poynter.org’s centerpiece today happens to be about newspaper usability. In it, Monica Moses argues not just for better design of pages, but better design of text. “Some of the news ought to be formatted as bullet points, lists, Q&As, and segmented text,” she says. The article focuses on print, but her suggestions are even more important for text that’s read online because small, low-resolution computer displays make reading itself that much more difficult.