Sometimes its fun to break the rules.

For instance, how long should a home page be? Exactly how much content should be squeezed onto a home page?

How about five gigantic ad spaces, 567 links, 71 images and… the entire day’s tv guide?

That’s how those crazy Norwegians at the news site Aftenposten.no do it, with their home page weighing in at a whopping 957 x 7833px. That’s right, almost eight thousand pixels in length, or more than 10 screen-lengths for a user browsing at 1024 x 768. By way of comparison, CNN.com weighs in at a paltry 2265px, and the New York Times at 3235px.

With the move to ~1000px wide designs well and truly underway, there’s only one way for designers to go, and that’s down.

But how do you keep it interesting? Pile on the pictures, that’s how!

Photos ahoy!

Aftenposten.no is all about pictures, and lots of them. On the home page there’s over 50 story photos alone, including their video highlights (especially if you spoke Norwegian!). They’re not all tiny thumbnails either. CNN’s US edition, by way of contrast has one lead photo, and a mere 7 tiny thumbnails.

When other sites leave you lost in a sea of tiny blue links, Aftenposten.no’s home page keeps you engaged almost all the way down, changing up their story hierarchy several times down the page. Just when you would expect things to trail off, they hit you with a two column wide picture and a headline to match. Then they do it two more times. Who says they can’t?

Beyond the home page

So their home page is different. Its long and content heavy. But what about their article pages?

For one, as of writing, the lead Aftenposten article has a 625 x 419px photo front and centre. Its not something you’re likely to miss.

In many ways feature photography has been a casualty of online news. Sure, there is potential to run slideshows and photography features, but there is nothing that really compares to the photos you see in a print publication, with their detail, physical size and visual prominence.

Aftenposten.no makes up for it in both the quantity and size of photography they run. It does give the site more of a tabloid feel, but so what? Is tabloid vs broadsheet even relevant in the online world?

Every page is a home page

Quite literally in Aftenposten.no’s case. At the end of every article you get a mini home page with the feature content, photos and all.

I think it’s brilliant.

It encapsulates one of the important lessons of designing content rich web sites - every page is a home page.

Think about it. Users can enter the site via search engines, RSS feeds, links from blogs, emails from friends, bookmarks, browser auto-complete and more.

If the total number of users entering the site via article pages is greater (or close to) those entering via the home page, which is the greater design concern? The article pages. They will get a heck of a lot more page views, in any case. Of course they are both important, but how often is the humble content page given the same sort of scrutiny as the traditionally all important home page?

It amazes me how often big news sites leave their users with nothing more than a mere handful of links to other stories--if that--when they could offer so much more. Its a silly rule that says you can only put a few small links right where users have finished reading, and thankfully Aftenposten.no does away with it.

You call that an ad?

Advertising should be a standard size, right? For most sites yes, but when you sell a lot of advertising to a particular market, you can make your own rules, and that’s exactly what Aftenposten.no appears to have done.

Advertising on Aftenposten.no is, in keeping with many other aspects of the site, big. In fact it is huge. At the end of an article (and the mini home page) they run 948 x 400px billboards. Why not? I bet they make a fair chunk of change from them too.

Conclusion

There’s a lot more that could be said about a big site like Aftenposten.no, such as their video strategy and sister sites, but the bottom line is this: A lot of designers talk about breaking the rules, but how often is it done in a traditionally conservative area such as online news design? It might not be the prettiest site ever, and Aftenposten.no’s design certainly isn’t for all news sites, but it pushes the boundaries in ways many other news sites could only dream of.