Review of Poynter.org

Poynter.org is the pinnacle of online journalism, featuring original content as well as many links to the rest of the journalistic world.

Poynter's color scheme is very soothing, with a nice mix of a smooth aqua and white. The homepage is a bit busy, however, with a ton of links and a number of featured columnists -- including the likes of Bill Romenesko, Al Tompkins and Amy Gahran.

There are three navigation bars including two on the right-hand side of the homepage for new content and career and business related information. This is distracting. It is initially difficult to determine the intended hierarchy of the site.

I do like the "Centerpiece" section at the top left, with the primary piece of the day, however I wish they'd boldface the title a bit more. They use a dark green, but it's uncharacteristically dull.

In terms of writing style and use of links, I'll use Romenesko as my crash-test dummy. His column(s) is more like a list of national journalism-related headlines with short summaries of his own. It's unlike print columns in that we don't get too much opinion from Romenesko. He's basically just providing information that is likely available in other places.

He uses links well, though. Each new topic is very clearly underlined and linked in a bold brown. So while he may be unconventional in the print sense, Romenesko does a nice job using the online medium to his advantage.