Regular readers here know I’m a big fan of Rob Curley and The Las Vegas Sun. Last October I declared:
I would say that this is THE BEST newspaper site in America however, it is not a traditional newspaper. Only a smaller version of the site is printed and distributed, as an insert, in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Still, this site kicks ass. It utilizes multimedia news reporting throughout the site, not just features. You’ll notice in the pictures above that the the front page changes every day, there are no rigid templates. The site uses Django and the Ellington CMS to do this as well as the genius of Rob Curley. -read on
Newspapers & Technology has just posted a story: Web shines brightly on Las Vegas Sun about how great they are. Check it out.
Related posts:
- Part 1, Good Media Website Examples – Newspapers
- Sun-Times Media Group Announces Innovative Changes to The Courier News
- Part 2, Good Media Website Examples – News Blogs and News Aggregators
- There does not exist one general news website that is economically sustainable
- Adrian Holovaty & Rob Curley Hack the Newspaper – Video
I would agree this is a very good web site. Really cool: “History” link at top to History of Vegas pages.
HOWEVER. Not to throw cold water, but why on earth is this stuff still there on January 17:
On the front page, above the fold, a feature called “New Year’s Eve —LasVegasSun.com has all the area New Year’s Eve festivities covered, including the Strip and downtown, and throughout the valley.”
Under the flag (or whatever the top logo is called online): “2008 Election” (Been over for 2 months)
Below the fold: “2008 Snowstorm—A rare snowstorm blanketed the Las Vegas Valley on December 17, delaying flights, causing widespread fender-benders and canceling school.” A month-old weather story?
The devil’s in the details in any website; but policing one’s front page for stale material should be a daily job.
Robert — Thank you for the post! I am so glad you like the site!
Martin — Two of the features that you point out on the Sun’s homepage (the snow storm and New Year’s Eve) are there for a very deliberate reasons: They’re both very deep special sections that not only embrace and exemplify the multimedia reporting that we love at the Las Vegas Sun, but (and more importantly) they’re sections that still get lots of traffic and are topics that are searched for both heavily on our site and via search engines.
Those stories are on our homepage because people are still looking for them and reading them. So, why make them hard to find?
This is also the reason why the CES section/content is still prominently linked on our homepage even though that convention is long over. People are looking for that content, so we’re making it easy to find.
The readership of the Las Vegas Sun’s website is more than 70 percent out of market, so we’re always trying to find that balance between serving our local readers and serving our readers who come to us for content about our city.
As for the election link, we just had a conversation about that link within the last few weeks. Our decision was to leave the link on our homepage through the inauguration and through the Nevada governor’s state-of-the-state address.
We monitor our homepage like crazy and benchmark every single link and section. I’ve blogged about that (and will blogging a lot more about our benchmarking on my personal blog).
http://robcurley.com/2008/11/24/the-five-ps/
And by watching how our readers actually use our site, we came to the decision that the snow storm coverage, the New Year’s Eve coverage, the CES coverage and the link to our election overviews were either big-traffic items or relevant to our readers in other ways at this time.
As you say, the devil’s in the details. And we pay uber-close attention to the details. That’s why our traffic is up over 300 percent in the last few months.
I hope this better explains why we’ve done the things on our homepage that you brought up. Whether you agree with those decisions or not, at least you know why they’re there!