Daily Nation Newspaper

Good

• The Daily Nation website provides daily good news and some analysis for people living in Kenya, Kenyans in the diaspora and anyone interested in Kenya.
  
• The layout of the website has improved significantly in the past year and mercifully the requirement for visitors to the website to sign up was dropped.
• Compared to other Kenyan websites there are many advertisements; one would hope that these advertisements generate enough revenue for this website to be viable financially.

Bad

• The content is seems to be organized around the layout of the print newspaper and the daily themes rather than the online community relies on the website to keep stay in touch with what is happening in Kenya. The Daily Nation website may need to clarify who their primary target audience is and design the website with this group in mind.
• The Daily Nation website seems to lack depth. With all the content that the Nation newspapers gathers on a daily basis the website comes across as thin in content. Perhaps this is because this just one of the units of the Nation Media group and every other unit has a website.
• Almost every web designer seems to break the rule that it should be clear what is a link and what is plain text. This needs to be clear to a visitor so that they know what they can click to read an article or move to another section of the website. Traditionally a link was marked by blue text, which has a different color from the plain text, and which which is also underlined or that is underlined when you move the mouse over the link. A visitor to the Daily Nation website has to keep moving the mouse to find out if the sentence or word is a link or just plain text. The website would do well to clearly show what is a link.
• The search bar at the top right of the website is poorly done. To assume that visitors to the website will discern that a white empty text box with a GO next to it is the search bar is a big mistake.

Ugly

• The website is rarely updated more than once in a day. With the exception of one or two events in the past 3 months where the webmasters tinkered with live updates postings e.g. during the Bbudget speech.
• The Latest News section which lists headlines and shows how long ago they were posted is horrible because most of the stories are 2 days old. Unless the Daily Nation website develops to the point where stories are updated regularly there is little point in having any reference to the age of a story other than that this is the website of a daily newspaper.

Comparative Website(s)

• The New York Times and Guardian are two of the best websites for a newspaper. They have been nominated and won won the Webby Award for the newspaper category.