It can be easy to fall into the trap of focusing so much on content management tools that you end up forgetting that they don't mean much of anything without good site design. Smashing Magazine this week published a great piece on newspaper Web sites that serves as a strong reminder of that very point.The article, titled Newspaper Website Design: Trends And Examples, goes into great detail dissecting many of the most popular content-driven sites, both online newspaper sites with companion print editions and online-only sites with heavy content volume (The Huffington Post, among others).

The article also examines some of the key design elements, such as navigation, page layout, and placement of advertisements, that can make a site easy to read and navigate, or a chore to slog through.

As the author, Steven Snell, states in the opening paragraph:

[News Web sites] all face the challenge of displaying a huge amount of content on the home page, which creates plenty of layout, usability, and navigational challenges for the designer. The lessons that can be learned from examining how news Web sites address these challenges can be valuable for designers who work with other types of Web sites, including ones with blog theme designs.

The piece is a great read with a number of excellent points, and uses examples from sites such as The New York Times Online, MSNBC, and even The Onion to illustrate them. Anyone setting out to design a content-centric site should consider this article a must-read, for both its advice on best practices and what pitfalls to avoid.