Question:
Why do newspaper website still look like complete data-dump link farms in 2010?
Answer:
??????????
An unscientific poll I conducted at my Community College revealed the best newspaper website, as voted on by me and some college students, is not even a newspaper website… it is the Huffington Post. Why? Because as soon as you land on the homepage you know what the big story of the day is. You don’t have to agree with their bent, but you know what’s going on in the world pretty damn quickly. NPR.org, CNN.com, and BBC.co.uk were in the mix too as were even more unconventional filters like reddit, digg, delicious, facebook and twitter.
I think i know what the news is
vs this
so what happened in the world today?
Newspaper website people, please do the following:
1. Use big pictures to tell a story, not because your readers are stupid and can’t read but because your readers are smart and want an engaging multimedia presentation.
2. Stop with the page jumps.
3. Stop with the invasive advertising.
4. Please break your mammoth newspaper website into a bunch of micro sites.
5. Fix your navigation.
6. Fix your navigation.
7. Fix your navigation.
8. Hire a web development company with no ties or experience with the newspaper industry to redesign your site.
9. Take your site down completely and syndicate your content to Google news… or whomever wants to make a deal.
Related posts:
- Part 2, Good Media Website Examples – News Blogs and News Aggregators
- Part 1, Good Media Website Examples – Newspapers
- Great News Website – The Las Vegas Sun
- Columbia Journalism School Event – Forging an International Consensus on Development and Climate Change
- 2010 America East Newspaper Conference – Exhibitors List