CNN Critique

CNN.com is definitely a "professional" website. It is very organized starting with the numerous news categories you can choose from at the top of the site. This makes it really easy to navigate right to what you're looking for. They have a video section so you can be sure you're getting a video newsclip if that's what you're looking for. Near the top is also a list of headlines (about half of which I could understand) You can pick a story based on the quick headline although you don't know if it will be text or video until you have clicked on it. There's a section on the main page to find what's on CNN's television station, and a section called "Quick Vote" which is interactive and allows you to vote on a question, then see what others have voted. It also brings you to an editorial about the question throughout which there are links to a number of related stories. Another section of the main page allows you to get your local weather and news headlines which I thought was really great because it means you can access this one site for all your news instead of having to find a local site also. In addition to the interactive feature of the vote they have a section called ireport which is a site where anyone can send in news stories, CNN has specific stories that they use and you can look at them based on the people reporting them or the topics that are being covered.
There are also a number of blogs and podcasts that you can get to from the main page. There is a lot of information on the opening page, and it's really easy to get lost in the site because there are so many options but for CNN this is probably a good thing. I thought that there was pretty minimal advertising on any given page which is nice because with so much information in front of you a lot of advertising would be really distracting.