Mondoweiss:Content Design

Mondoweiss, a blog about politics in the Middle East, has a pleasant user experience and layout. The text of articles are short and concise creating an easy read for the user. The 12 articles on the blog are organized in rows and give a blurb about each article. After clicking on the title the user is taken to a new page with the full article. There are also a list of related articles below the article itself. 

The simple layout allows users to easily find an article and read it. The website has such short articles it's easy to scan through content. 

The website uses chunking with articles. Longer articles have bigger chunks, which can look daunting to the eye. The site has a problem of using long titles, but they do fully explain what the article is about. Philip Weiss, the site's blogger, obviously copyedits well because there aren't any misspelled words or grammatical errors that I could find. This creates a pleasant user experience.

Weiss doesn't use the inverted pyramid in articles. He usually opens up with explaining what happened, who the key characters are and then quotes another source. He then leaves commentary at the end of the article. 

Titles of pages are clear and concise and allow for quick scanning. This site has great legibility with black text against a white background and navy blue links along the right side of the home page.

The article above the fold was titled "BDS works" by Weiss, which didn't have as much opinion as the quote from Ron Ben-Yeshai's article. The article was about the solutions that need to be done to end the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. Weiss wrote, "No, Israel is getting isolated on the world stage, and it’s going to start to hurt the country. Notice in this excerpt that Ben-Yeshai says part of  the answer is: We should alter our conduct." The posting didn't seem newsworthy but brought attention to Ben-Yeshai's article. It's as if Weiss let Ron Ben-Yeshai give the opinion and Weiss piggy backed on what Ben-Yeshai said.