"The Anniston Star" has a great website that allows users to browse directly to news that is directly relevant to their interests. The banner below the Anniston Star logo not only organizes news by the typical categories (News, Sports, Entertainment, etc.), but further divides these categories into more specific sub-categories. For example, if you want to read about sports, you can hover your mouse over the Sports tab, which will be followed by a pop-up menu, from which you may view the top story, recent headlines, or jump straight into looking for news about your favorite local team.
"The Wall Street Journal's" website isn't as sophisticated as the Anniston Star in the same respects, but it has a very simple and intuitive layout appropriate for a news website. With a slight emphasis on economics and stock exchanges, you can easily find the current major stock market indexes, currency exchange rate, and market forecasts all on one page.
However, the "Fox News" website looks rather cluttered on the front page, with so many different articles being smashed together as if none of them can really grab your attention. If we go to the politics section, the pictures are given captions that are larger than the titles of the articles, which is an odd design choice for a news site, and most of the widgets set on the page seem rather useless, given little information when a simple link to a more sophisticated and inclusive page would do.
GameFAQs is a useful website full of user generated content that lists every game ever made, gives basic information about the release dates, synopses, sales figures, and most importantly user created FAQs which can serve as comprehensive guides. If someone has played it, then chances are there is a guide for it on this site. The message boards require a free account to post, but you can access and read just about any of the game related message boards without one. If you have a specific question that isn't covered in an FAQ, you can search the topics on the message boards for answers. It's easy to find a game with multiple search options. You can look at the top games on each of the most recent systems, and view which games are the most popular in stores and which are the most talked about on the site. It has been around for almost 20 years, and the user generated content is constantly expanding, even on older games from the 90s.
As for an absolutely terrible website that I can't stand. I really haven't regularly used one, but for the purposes of this assignment, let's take a moment to revel in the awfulness of MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies website.
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