The BBC News website:  (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news)

Colours – Dark crimson with blues writing making it obvious that all of the headlines are hyperlinks.  Any explanation of a story which is not the headline is then in black to differentiate it. 

Font – Sans-serif with no fancy squiggly bits. 

Navigation – There is a toolbar on the left for different types of news story.  There are also a number of links to individual stories down the right hand-side of the page, which have relevance to the main story.  The BBC News crimson banner remains constant at the very top of the page, with the date and time. 

Interactivity – There is the opportunity to bookmark an article with a number of different applications, including Facebook.  many pages also link to comments pages or blogs where users (so long as they are registered) can leave their own opinions.   

Guardian Unlimited: (http://www.guardian.co.uk/)

Colours – Each seperate section of the website (sport, arts, finance, etc.) is differentiated with its own colour in the form of a line above the raft of stories on that topic.  There is  quite a large prominence given to pictures – which are all in colour.

Fonts – Headlines are written in a serif font, whilst everything else is sans.  Again, headlines functioning as hyperlinks are blue while explanations are in black.

Navigation – There are a number (well, three) colnus on the right hand side of the front page, each giving a different range of links.  This looks a little busy and confused to me.  There is quite a mind-boggling myriad of pages that can be jumped to with just a single strike of the mouse.   There are five pages worth of stuff on the front page before getting to the bottom, this seems a few too many.

Interactivity – There are blogs wheere comments can be left but no polls.

Stockport Express: (http://www.stockportexpress.co.uk)

Colours – A rather dull grey masthead which is dominated by an advert rather than the name of the paper.  The predominant colour is then red, which appears for the headlines and links to other news stories. 

Fonts – It may be the monitor I’m using, but the font looks a little small and there seems to be quite a lot of space left between lines of text.  The font is serif with the g’s having funny squiggly bits. 

Navigation – Below the masthead there are links to different areas of the site, and this appears to then be duplicated on the left of the page.  Stories are given down the right-hand side (as with the previous two sites) but the lack of a different background colour or any sort of box around them means that they fail to really stand out from the rest of the page.

Interactivity – The two listed options are “Audio and video” and “Your pictures”.  The latter of these links to an external Manchester website where pictures can be uploaded and pictures posted by other people can be viewed.