The Schwab website definitely has its strengths and its weaknesses and unfortunately you cannot really see all they have to offer unless you are a member. However, the website is very good and has a lot of content within it from stock trading and research to education/news articles to banking to retirement solutions, etc. The problem is because there is so much information, it is hard to get lost and not really know where to look, so yes the website can be simplified a little bit especially in the menu drop-down organization. First they have the main horizontal navigation bar at the top and then a sub-menu navigation bar that is related in content to what you click on the main nav bar. However there's also the pop-up menus if you hover over the main navigation bar that blocks half of the screen. This gets very annoying and I think they should design it in such a way that there's an extra drop-down menu when you hover over the sub nav bar. Anyway, it's a pet peeve of mine when those drop-down menus take over your screen.
Schwab has a lot of good things in the design as well. The text and graphics they use is very modern and clean. I'm not sure what design aesthetic you would call it but they use white, blue and shades of grey mostly throughout the entire site and they are trying a new beta design that is more intuitive, attention-grabbing and simple. They make me keep coming back again and again because they have my money but other than that, they don't try to up-sell you or market to you with a bunch of ads which is very nice.
The Google news site is, in my opinion, very good. They show articles like a traditional news site with headlines and other subjects of interest but they show different news sources on the same news story so it makes it easy to read other viewpoints. You can even manage the news sources that they show so if you don't like a certain news organization that they show, you can tell Google to not show them again. I find myself reading from other sources that I didn't even know existed. I don't have time to surf the web so a service like this one is great. The layout is great, the site is clean and if you have a Google account it gets better because they can tailor to your preferences. On the right side they have highlighted boxes that include fact checking and trending topics which can be an interesting to see. The news can be improved by showing more topics in the headlines and not just political stuff but I guess that's just the sign of the times. Unless I haven't seen it or haven't figured it out yet but I would like to see more variety such as magazine articles that relate to the news stories; I think the world of magazines is shrinking which is a pity. Google news has me coming back because it seems that they are more fair about what news they show and you can manage sources. It's also an easy one click way to get all you need for a daily dose of information.
-DavidT
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