These past two years we’ve seen the emergence of Web 2.0 and all it’s associated dangers. It’s easy to fall for what’s cool instead of focusing on what’s good. Fortunately, these 5 sites know how to use CSS and JavaScript to improve the user experience instead of relying on them to provide that experience.

MSNBC

What I like about this site is its front page. It displays the most important news at the top and how it uses typography to show what elements are more important. It also presents a deeper and clear picture of what’s happening in the world, one subject at a time. Sadly this rigid lay-out isn’t available at it’s news items.

Times online

The British newspaper The Times offers most of its articles online. By using a grid based lay-out it succeeds in displaying a lot of news without being chaotic. The site is extremely scanable by using a combination of grid design and typography. If only they’d rewritten the text for the web.

CNN

Another example of using the grid is CNN. By creating a lot of white space CNN goes against the flow. It does result in a website that’s very breezy. The articles follow a similar design pattern. Story highlights and tabbed extra information make this site extremely scanable.

CNN Politics

This is the same concept but with a dark color scheme. Unfortunately, the articles are displayed in virtually the same way as the CNN sister site. This sends a user to a completely “new” site. It also uses a tad of inaccessible JavaScript, but you’ve got to love those vote tallies.

BBC

Old but refreshingly new. The updated BBC news site makes all information accessible at all times. The site follows a rigid typographic scheme and allows for several accessibility options.

If you’re working on a new site, I highly recommend taking a peak at the BBC visual language guidelines.