As the Internet became more popular, new organizations began to create new websites to host extensive collections of news stories. Such a rapid technological evolution has changed the way that news is presented and, in turn, viewed by the readers across media platforms. News websites are a powerful medium that use different visual elements to present news stories in a way that is easy to consume, understand and recall. This evolution offers a wide array of choices for designing and presenting online news stories however, little is known about how users perceive different displays of the same information. Visual elements play a key role in attracting readers to stories and improving recall and comprehension. Exploring the effects of visuals of news websites is becoming important because of the increasing number of visual elements used in these websites. Therefore, this interdisciplinary study aims to examine the effects of three visual elements of news website on both comprehension and recall. These visual elements are photo, font type and whitespace. The results indicate that there are differences in both comprehension and recall levels among the participants in this study according to the use of different variations and combinations of the visual elements. The effect of each visual element varied based on these different combinations of the other two elements. Also, the study found that the font type had the least effect compared to the other two elements on both comprehension and recall levels of the viewers. This study also showed that the use of the whitespace in news website design had increased both comprehension and recall levels.