Atlas Obscura is an information website that explores a niche, in contrast to the broad variety offered by Sky News and WikiHow. The target audience is for explorers and travellers, with a focus on lesser-known, unique destinations.
The logo uses clean, bold lettering and design with a muted and earthy colour palette. The practicality of the logo creates a serious tone, this is effective as it indicates that their information is reliable and straightforward. The target audience is mainly around 25-34 year olds, allowing the website to lean into a more mature aesthetic. The house style has a similar approach to the logo, the website is modernised with clean, bold sans-serif text.
As you enter the webpage, there's a banner displayed at the top with an external link attached to the advertisement. Whenever the page is refreshed, the ad changes. This is in order to cover the variety of brands which have paid them to promote. As a niche website, ads are normally more prominent on the page to generate higher profits for the website that they can reinvest in keeping it up-to-date.
The main image is to promote an article published this week. When images are hovered over, they zoom in closer within the frame this interactive feature stops the simplicity of the page being flat. It emphasises and promotes the article that is being hovered over.
The photography used for the other images throughout the page highlights the beautiful scenery of a variety of locations in order to to sell and attract the users to travel. The page uses a large amount of white space through minimal copy. The copy on the page is reserved mostly for the articles. Using a smaller amount of copy gives a greater chance for gaining the reader's attention with a short, snappy line that summarises the article. Otherwise, the reader may be put off of large amount of texts displayed for a variety of different points on the home page, and not get the chance to identify what location interests them. The line of articles in a four-a-page selection allows space for the images and text to be visually big enough on the screen, instead, interactive arrows give users the opportunity to navigate further into other articles. Similarly, interactivity is used in the option to look at the 'most recent' articles.
Once selecting an article, the text only fills a proportion of the page. This layout increases the readability as spreading large amounts of text across whole width of the page can make absorbing the information not as effective and is likely to make the reader more unfocused. The text is balanced with a box sharing the location of the place, with a call-to-action to 'get directions' through a button, leading to an external link. The external link provides the user with a separate tab being opened to Google Maps and outlining their specific journey. Through leading to an extra tab, this allows the user easy access back to the website as it will still be open, instead of replacing it with the link. The 'related tags' allows locations with similar features to be found in order to find the ideal place for that particular user.
The navigation of the website is simplistic. Whilst the option to explore the variety of articles displayed below the fold of the home page is available, if users are more aware of the place they're looking for specifically, they can look through the navigation bar placed at the top of the website (just below the advert). The natural colours of the page are consistent as the green reminisces grass and forests. The main categories are found at the side with a darker green behind them, creating a bold distinction between these and the options of countries to the side.
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