The Wall Street Journal isn't just for businessmen and stock-minded Americans anymore. Though their target audience will likely remain with this class, the journal certainly seeks to reach a wider variety of reader with its online publications.

WSJ.com gives its readers a very pleasing experience. Sometimes the amount of information can be overwhelming, but the layout and user-friendly features give the reader enough context to be able to understand the information.

But one thing is very different about WSJ.com than many other news Web sites. To access the site's content, users must pay a subscription fee. When I subscribed to the journal last year, I opted to only receive access to the online publication, rather than receive the hard copy as well. The fact that users have to pay will obviously diminish the amount of readership, but I believe this income is what allows WSJ to continue their wide coverage of world, business, political, economical and health news, as well as the many other areas of coverage. And casual readers will still be able to access a good amount of content before being asked to log in.  Most videos and articles can be seen in part before logging in.

Layout

WSJ.com's homepage has a common new site layout. Across the top, below the flag, are several drop down tabs where users can select different areas of the site to go to - everything from the day's newspaper to each users personal pages to online extras like blogs and discussion forums. Down the left side of the page are the tabs that take the user to the different sections of the paper itself - news, technology, travel, real estate, opinion, etc. Each of these sections have subsections that further organize the news for the user.

A great aspect of the layout is the ability the user has to search in different ways. One can simply click on the sections tabbed on the homepage, or one can search their favorite writer or columnist, or one can peruse the homepage for interesting articles, videos or commentary.

Content

WSJ.com covers a wide variety of content, usually in a very detailed and dense way. Many of their articles are much longer than other news sites. This can be a turn-off to some readers, but WSJ has the luxury of knowing that its readers are subscribers who paid for the content, so they provide as much of it as they can. I also enjoyed not having to sift through celebrity news and gossip to find real news about politics and economics like I do on some other news sites.

And, building on their reputation as a great source for market economics and stock information, WSJ.com offers users a great amount of this kind of content. Users get full coverage of the previous day's stock happenings, as well as information that can be used to foresee future market failures and successes.

One of my favorite features of WSJ.com is the ability to easily view the news of yesterday. The site organizes the last 30 days of news into easy to view pages. If one needs to see something that was in the paper two weeks ago, all they have to do is click on that day's date to see the full content from that day. Also, with each day, the user can view a PDF file of the front page of each section, so the user can read each front page as it was laid out for the presses.

Multimedia

WSJ.com definitely doesn't disappoint users with its grasp of multimedia. The site offers a video center, podcasts, RSS feeds, email alerts, mobile features, etc. The site also allows users a great amount of interactivity with its discussion forums, polls, writer and columnist contact information, story comments, etc. But one of the best features of all is the personalization of the site.

While the site will remain the same, users can click on their own personal page where they have selected the types of news that interest them the most. Users can track the news of up to 10 companies they wish to follow, 30 stocks they wish to follow, 10 columnists they wish to follow and 10 topics they wish to follow. This interactivity gives the reader a great ability to search through the news more quickly, and still read all the news they want to read.

While WSJ.com is a pay site, users will be guaranteed a great amount of content that is easy to sift through because of personalization abilities and an organized layout. And although much of the news is very business-minded, there is just as much regular world news as any other news site out there today.