The Lawrence Journal-World website is said to be one of the best online publications, but you might not guess that they had something unmatched up their sleeves by just looking at their homepage. The best part of LJ-World is their designers who seem to come up some of the best work for online featurettes, just like their latest, Mining’s Legacy: A Scar on Kansas.

Some of the best features of Mining’s Legacy are the incorporation of various media with little effort or intrusion on the design’s part. This particular featured-story should be the model for almost all other featured stories online. Like ML, they need to be enriched with vast amounts of media and depth, enhanced by a design that reflects the feelings and historical/social aspects of the story. ML takes the cake on this one.

The implementation of key design and media trends makes ML worthy of an unmatched style gallery entry. It’s one of the best parallels of your typical newsprint featured lead. That is to say, they’ve taken the idea of a large and somewhat moving image and combined it with the heading and content you’d expect to come across in a printed news story to make an improved “news story.”

Rather than simply developing an online version of the story, they used their skills and technologies to develop an online experience. It uses a wide layout and advancing Web techniques (i.e., SlideShow Pro and Flash video/audio) to make for an improved rendition of any similar print story.