Drudge Report - Design

Design

The site's design has seen few changes since its 1997 debut, and remains entirely written in unscripted HTML with a mostly monochromatic color scheme of black boldface monospaced font text on a plain white background. The Drudge Report was described by Cheryl Woodard, co-founder of PC, Macworld, PC World and Publish magazines, as "a big, haphazard mishmash of links and photos" and by Dan Rahmel as "popular despite a plain appearance". The Report website is simple and, according to Paul Armstrong of webwithoutwords.com, retro in feel. Jason Fried of 37signals.com calls it "one of the best designed sites on the web." It consists of a banner headline and a number of other selected headlines in three columns in monospaced font. Most link to an outside source, usually the online edition of a newspaper, which hosts the story. When no such source is available, either because the story is 'developing' with little known details at the moment or is an exclusive scoop, a special page is created on the Drudge Report servers which contains text and possibly images.

There are different importance levels a story could appear as on the site, the rating of which relies on Matt Drudge's editorial discretion. The Report almost always holds one major story above the logo, usually just one sentence hyperlinked to the most important story of the day. Other stories surrounding the main headline can be found in the upper left hand side of the page and link to more specific articles dealing with aspects of the headline story. The standard story, either the headline or links below the logo, are written in black. The stories Drudge considers most important are in red, all under a single major headline in large, bold type. For especially important breaking stories, especially if still emerging, Drudge places art of a flashing red light on the screen.

Although the site initially featured very few images, it is now usually illustrated with five or six photographs. Generally the images, like the linked headlines, are hotlinked from other news agencies' servers.