I came on as the lead designer at The Business Journals late last year after this redesign was launched -- and while I disagree with the 99.5% number -- I agree 100% that there was lots of room for improvement.

And that's why we're rolling out a redesign of the main homepage in a couple of weeks:

http://cl.ly/25071M0m1R2t3Z0F053B

There are a lot of factors at work with the design of any homepage, and that was certainly the case with the current design -- really tight deadline, new CMS, work was contracted out to a design agency, etc.

But our great local business reporting deserved better and I'm happy to say we're getting there.

The content classifications are arguable. The main headline is about a movie, which is a million-dollar investment and business; and it's Friday, peak day when moviegoing and news consumption overlap. I think it'd be quite reasonable to count that as business news. The distinction between navigation and business news can also be fuzzy; it's not clear why the bottom-left links to headlines count as navigation but the bottom-center links count as content. Finally, everything below the fold is ignored, where the proportion of content does improve. (Above-the-foldness is relevant but not the entire story.)

The classifying was obviously done with an agenda in mind to push this story; take it with a grain of salt. (Don't get me wrong, the page is indeed still content-light and fluff-heavy, but to cite 99.5% is misleading.)

Here's what I see when I tell my browser to pretend it's an iPhone:

http://imgur.com/QVpwz

I'm always shocked when I see screenshots with ads on webpages, with adblock plus, I've basically forgotten that's what the web looks like to a lot of people. I can't imagine using the web without adblock.

There is a competitive advantage for startups that embrace this. Hipmunk gets a lot of their user experience love by eliminating the single digit content problem that Stephen describes here vs. Expedia, Travelocity, etc. They even have a slide that illustrates the wasted space on competitor sites with color boxes.

This is a bizjournals.com site - They run 41 of these city specific business journal sites as online companions to a weekly print edition of the journal.

There's nothing special about this - pull up any newspaper or online news site and you'll see the same thing.

Measuring generously, 284×22 are devoted to news. That’s half a percent for content, 99.5% other stuff.

Alas, it's not such a mystery if you read that as "99.5% profit."

ATBNews is just badly named. They write about more than just Business news so its an injustice to them criticize them for not listing only business news.

I think there are plenty of examples of poorly designed web pages out there (most are poorly designed). The trick is describing what makes a great home page and why. Even without the color coding I think many of us could see how poorly laid out this page is.

Could someone please explain what, exactly, is wrong with that page? I mean, other than the fact that it's full of ads.

Edit: This is not a troll post. I really don't see anything wrong with that site, but apparently lots of other people do.