Website: www.clarionreview.org
The Clarion Review is an online magazine featuring essays, book reviews, and poetry. Clarion’s mission is to “…promote literary culture in the great tradition of Christian humanism.”
Clarion is a text-heavy and content rich site. With plenty of white space and the liberal use of uniformly sized and compelling images, we were able to break up the heaviness that plagues many text-heavy sites while preserving an intuitive and attractive organizational structure
Indexing and navigation are crucial in online magazines and newspapers. Clarion has three navigation bars all intuitively organized: 1) administrative functions along the top of the site (visible on all pages); 2) main categories as secondary navigation (visible on all pages); and 3) an index of new and featured articles (visible on the home page).
The sidebar uses images to pass along information which adds to the aesthetic quality of the site. Sidebars disappear when a user clicks to an article so that no space is wasted in presenting the information. The user has the option to email or print the article as he is reading it.
Clarion chose LOGOS Web Services because the Content Management System they were using was clumsy and non-intuitive. Clarion editors often took up to an hour to post a new article. With their new site, they shaved it down to a mere five minutes including image placement.
Clarion was so satisfied with their new site they decided to host it with Orthodox Internet Services, the hosting partner of LOGOS Web Services.