However, just like many other websites these days, they compete with thousands of others for the eyeballs of Internet readers. Aside from competing with other news websites in terms of the quality of their content, the race is also on design of the website and the quality of the interface.

More than being an online version of a newspaper, news websites have launched into great design and functionality, portability in order to draw more readers. In effect, the battle of the news websites is similar, if not tougher than the different battles being fought by other website categories competing for the attention of Internet users. As everyday activities shift online and more people being linked to the web, how the advertising and revenues and subscription payments will be divided among the thousands of websites online is a matter important for business survival.

There are several categories in the design of news websites that make some stand out from the rest. The first and most important is the ability to post the latest news the fastest. The advantage of the Internet is never shown better than this. With thousands and millions of people online, news websites can deliver the news the moment it happens. That is real essence of news – the freshness, the new-ness of the NEWs.

Another aspect is the potential for multimedia. Newspapers have still photos and long explanations in text. TV has a few seconds of flash news but no deep context. In great news websites, text, perspective, context and attention grabbing video, voice and graphics can be combined in one medium.

One advantage of successful news websites is interactivity. People can ask, answer and discuss the pressing issues of the day real time and with people from all over the world. A letter to the newspaper editor will get days if ever it is published. A letter to the TV station manager will most likely never be read. However, a comment and an opinion from an ordinary citizen can be posted in a news site and every person online, from a company CEO to students in a university library will read that opinion.

The race for great website design is no longer a race for trophies and accolades. It is a race for attention and loyalty of readers. It is a race for advertisers who would want to tap those readers. And this is not better exemplified by news websites who must continually improve and innovate as their advertising is their lifeline.

A web design emphasizes the aesthetic qualities and the functional features of a web site. It is therefore, in distinct with web programming as it creates the presentation of contents to end-users.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which is published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is primarily concerned with the conformances to the standard accessibility principles on the contents of web pages and web sites. W3C working group, therefore, aims to standardize the Web technology. These principles can be summarized as follows:

• The separation of content from the presentation or otherwise known as semantic markup, thus, provides a meaningful structure.
• The usage of a valid markup language.
• Provision of text equivalents to non-text components such as images, or multimedia.
• The usage of hyperlinks to information that are out of context,
• Discouragement on the utilization of frames.
• The usage of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) rather than Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) tables for the layout.
• Authoring the pages to remain intelligible.

Web design planning is a complex, yet an essential phase before the creation and the hosting of user-defined websites. Thorough consideration on what the needed items are including the context, the purpose, and the audience, is extremely important.

An individual who may want to have his own website either makes his own from scratch or through application software made available in the context of the Internet, or he can hire someone to make a website for him. The design could be simple or something more than what others have to offer to its audience. A well-designed website can be an asset to a company far more of becoming part of the corporate identity; or if the developer wants to show off his talents and skills to prospective clients and/or employers through designing his own, why not?

There are thousand web design software’s available in the market today. Others may cost a month’s salary, but still others are available for free. Among those that are classified as an open source are the SeaMonkey and the Wix.

SeaMonkey is an Internet application suite packaged with a Web editor. Due to its simplistic features, professional web designers are not suited to use this. This, therefore, is for beginners who want to build their own web page from scratch with the use of this tool.

Wix is another revolutionary online web design tool, which provides users various possibilities including the creation of professional websites with stunning flash contents.  This easy to use drag and drop editor needs not be downloaded and requires no technical knowledge to those who would opt to use this tool.

Designing a good website is deceivingly difficult. It involves achieving a usable and pleasing design that delivers technically sound and visually coherent information. There are known essential principles of a good web design. Each of these principles is described below.

1. Precedence – directing a user’s eyes to a sequence of steps; thus, it refers to the positioning of website contents.
2. Spacing – line spacing, padding, and empty space affects readability.
3. Navigation – where you are now and where you can go further should be identifiable.
4. Design to build – knowing what can and can’t be done is important.
5. Typography – refers to font choices, font sizes, spacing, line length, color, and paragraphing.
6. Usability – aside from the navigability, topography, and precedence principles, usability may refer to the adherence to standards, user-friendliness, and emulating what users can do with your design.
7. Alignment – more ordered and polished design.
8. Clarity – all about pixels; it refers to the crispness and sharpness of the design.
9. Consistency – means everything should match including the heading sizes, the font choices, the image choices, and etc.

However complex a web design can be, the quality should not be neglected. Quality assurance is an important step because it defines the subset of the overall usability goal of the design. It is also important to consider a post-deployment phase for the ongoing maintenance in the future.