With just a little bit of know how, low budget and no budget news websites can produce professional looking pages that bring them into line with their heavy-weight competitors.

Who needs a snazzy web designer with a four year degree when the tools for a news web site’s success are right there, available for free on the internet.

Maybe this is the opinion of the big wigs at Fairfax who have just decided to scrap 550 jobs throughout their media organisation. (Although I’d like to see what would happen if the CEO tried to run The Age website for a day! Note my experiment with Picassa below.)

The availability of free photo gallery tools such as Picasa, Bubbleshare and SlideFlickr make telling news stories online more efficient and most importantly they save space.

A slide show allows a homepage to have more attention grabbing pictures, with less scrolling. Imagine if a traditional newspaper could fit ALL its top stories onto the front page without looking cluttered.

This tool is suited perfectly to internet news. It can assist in ‘storybuilding’, as journalists can upload photos to be added directly to the slide show of their story, updating throughout the day.

Just visit the Herald Sun or The Australian homepage and you’ll see how this handy technique is used to great effect.

New tools are making Internet news more efficient and more affordable to produce; levelling the playing field between the big organisations and the small news sites.