[LINK] Welcome to our new website

[Ivan Trundle]

On 30/05/2007, at 8:21 PM, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:

> Anybody any comments on the new Australian IT website?
>
> To me it's a lot less useful, harder to navigate, harder to find  
> real content, full of adverts and is often confusing. The feedback  
> is not all all positive.

Couldn't agree more, Bernard (though I can't see the advertising -  
the joys of adblock technology in browsers).

Iit follows a 'broadsheet' model of layout which is ideally suited  
for print and newspaper, but fails to engender any familiarity for  
online readers. This happens all the time. It is busy, ridiculously  
brief in both headings and subheadings, has little to captivate  
interest, and is there for the die-hards alone. The trend to use non- 
underlined links makes navigation difficult. The choice of pre- 
masthead navigation, masthead navigation, subnavigation, column  
navigation, and story navigation offers a plethora of uninteresting  
choices.

The screenspace is too wide for my liking: being a Mac user, I prefer  
to have multiple windows open and often overlapping, and rarely use  
the full width of my available pixels on my screen, so it is annoying  
to have to scroll left and right, and bad enough that I have to  
scroll down to find anything to read.

Headline length is constrained by the layout: there's no need to  
restrict it this way out of print, and headings like 'Fresh funds for  
ICS global' must surely appeal to the two people who read that far,  
and with any interest.

Has anyone counted the number of headings on the home page?

And, to put this in perspective, how do you know what you've read and  
not read - two days on, or a week? OR even just an hour...? The point  
is that it's useless having multiple points of entry if they keep  
changing all of the time, and don't offer the option of showing where  
you've been

Sites like this are lightyears behind other news sites such as  
digg.com or reddedit.com, etc - these sites show how the news will be  
read in the future: a headline that is legible, and a snippet of the  
content - and people will vote them into popularity, and not decided  
by the editor alone.

I won't be bookmarking the site, nor using its RSS feeds: there are  
other, more useful resources.

iT

--
Ivan Trundle
http://itrundle.com ivan at itrundle.com
ph: +61 (0)418 244 259 fx: +61 (0)2 6286 8742
skype: callto://ivanovitchk