What effect does the design of online news sites have on reader behaviour?

- ‘reader’ as defined by unique visitor as defined by Alexa.com, Google Analytics, server-side analytics or other web analytics platform.

A sample group of 50-100 (too many? too few?) online news publications will be chosen for analysis of two basic kinds:

1. Design analyses:: Tagging the homepage and story page* of news sites in the sample with design attributes**
2. Web behaviour analytics:: The three tools listed above are starting points. 

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*default to looking at design of ‘news’ stories for sites without uniform story page design

**i.e. tabbed content areas, grid-based layout, measured graphics to text to white space ratios, number of links per page, etc —>see Relevant Design Attibutes