This is a paraphrased
collection of feedback provided on the blog www.joannageary.wordpress.com
to the post “Anyone want to help design the Birmingham Post website?”
I have tried to give a
flavour of what was on the site (and elsewhere) in ten points.
The full comments can be
found on the blog and by following the trackback links at the bottom of the
comments sections.
1. Easy viewing
This was the most commonly
repeated request and frequently involved the use of RSS feeds:
Paul Groves said he would like to see, “easy, quick links to
stories and features”.
Daz Wright wants us to simplify the homepage: “Much less
attention to selling us services like dating and horoscopes will make people
revisit giving you the opportunity to increase ad revenue.”
Ease of locating stories within the main
site is important to dp.
Plenty of nice URLs,
suggests Tom: “seriously, I want to go to /edgbaston and get my local
news.”
Jack Kirby would
like RSS feeds that segregated stories by location: “Some kind of ability to
pick up local (constituency level) as well as city-wide stories in feeds would
be useful.
Jon Bounds agrees, adding that we also need category-based RSS
feeds and urls such as /football, /music and /art.
General reads all his news via RSS and would like the
choice between subscribing to a feed with just a headline and synopsis and one
that features the full article text.
2. Regular updates
Get content up fast says Jon Bounds: “News is
about immediacy, why ruin the advantage of the web by holding back stuff until
it’s hit the dead trees.”
When it comes to blogging,
“do it properly or don’t do it all,” says Paul Groves. He adds that
simply reprinting columns that have appeared in the newspaper is not good
enough. Bogs need to be fresh material and regularly updated.
This is an opinion shared
by Jon Bounds: If there are to be things labelled up as blogs then they
should actually be blogs, written, comment moderated, and engaged with by
bloggers themselves. Not just c’n'p’d from elsewhere, or tossed up and left to
rot.”
Simon K adds that the site should be more than just an
adjunct to the print edition to build up readership.
3. Easy to share
“Make it easy for readers
to place your work in front of their friends,” says Craig McGinty.
Make sensible decisions
with sharing, says Jon Bounds: “It’s all very well adding buttons to
’share this on digg’, as it’s easy to do, but will a Post story have any
digg traction (answer, no). Pick these links carefully, delicious, Facebook,
Email this, Up Yer Brum - but not the big worldwide geek sites.”
4. Easy to search
A “top notch” search
function would allow us to de-clutter, says dp, who would prefer the
homepage to be simply “a banner and a search engine”. It would also save the
user time searching for a story in vein.
General also stresses the importance of tagging, so does Paul Bradshaw .
5. Accessibility
Making sure that readers
can access the site with whatever web technology they choose is important.
Nice clean modern web
standards, accessibility and browser support are important, says Tom. “I
want to be able to access the site on an iPhone or on a Wii,” he adds.
6. Use video wisely
“Video is nice, but unless
your employing people to film, edit it and share it properly it won’t be worth
it”, says Tom. He wants to be able to embed our videos and expects us to
publish them on YouTube.
Tom also suggests creating a weekly video podcast of
all of the stories you’ve published.
Video and audio are not “must haves”, for Jon
Bounds. But, if they are used, they must be a “coherent part of the web
experience”. He adds: “If there’s video or audio content out on the web, link
to it or embed it, don’t try to produce everything. That said, the odd
picture would be nice.”
“Get in a videojournalist. It’s a real job,” says TomS
7. Be careful with comment
While it’s a “web dream” to allow comments on every
story, Jon Bounds warns against it: “the reality is that it’s a legal
shitstorm for large organisations to do. How much does comment on breaking news
improve the site?
“I prefer a clean break - you can
comment on the comment pieces (which are much more like blog posts), but not on
news stories.”
But Todd Nash disagrees: “I think
that comment sections on individual stories can work. This is what they do for
my local newspaper back home it can produce interesting debate.”
8. Value internal and external linking
Daz Wright says Birmingham desperately needs a site that
“brings together news about Birmingham on the Internet”.
“There’s more of us and we
know lots of stuff that you don’t,” says Tom, adding that if we link and
credit external blogs and photos on flickr, we will build a better relationship
between The Post and the online community.
dp suggests a “linklog” of other people’s news: “A
news ticker of local blog/pod/videofeeds would be a nice touch.”
General wants us to make sure our articles are “richly
linked”, asking for a list of related links (I am assuming both internal and
external) on the page.
Journalists should be book marking webpages related
to their story, says Jon Bounds: “then they can either be pulled into
the text of the story (in context, an ideal) or listed or even just linked to
(”see more on this story on delicious”).
“Give each Jouno a page which aggregates their
stories and syndicates in any online stuff they’re using for their news
gathering - delicious, Twitter, Flickr, etc,” says Pete Ashton.
TomS suggests we could pull ultra-local stories off from
the Birmingham Mail website.
Don’t do this in isolation,
says Daz Wright: “Birmingham has got some very good community sites and
quite a few people that have been doing this for a number of years. Learn from
them.”
Craig McGinty quotes Jeff Jarvis: “do what you do best, and link
to the rest”.
9. Adverts
Anything
BUT the ones that scroll over text, agree General, Paul Groves
and Jon Bounds.
10. Look to the future
Jon
Bounds highlights Geotagging and
APML as two of the next big things (the following is quoted in full):
- Geotagging.
It’s a simple way to add location data (latitude and longitude normally)
to stories - or anything else. It’s just data without some way of
accessing it (and at the moment people haven’t progressed too far from
laying it on maps), but it’s important and will become more so.
- APML.
Stands for Attention Profile Markup Language, and is an attempt to make
the data that most sites collect (about the user’s preferences and
behaviour) standardised so they can be shared and used - to push only
relevant content. Advertisers love this by the way, as they can really
target then.
So far so, geek nonsense - but what if you
combined the two. Let’s just say I live in Moseley, am a music lover, like
arts, but I’m not bothered for politics or health news (not true, btw, but bear
with me) - now a story about a doctors surgery in Great Barr wouldn’t interest
me much, but I would care about news of a new practice in Kings Heath.
Having geo data and attention data and combining the two would mean the most
interesting an relevant news for the user - a customised paper for all,
automatically.