I’ve always been amazed atPoynter’s Eyetrack studies examining what users really spend their time looking at as they visit a web page. I really haven’t spent much time looking atEyetrack III which came in 2004, but even two years later there is a lot of good information to be had. This latest version of their eyetrack student covered homepage design, article-page design, advertising and multimedia.
Most newspaper websites put off their web redesigns as long as possible. After four years, The Commercial Appeal gave their website a complete overhaul yesterday. The CA’s redesign is of particular interest to me because I personally participated in a previous redesign when I worked in their New Media department.
I really like their new design. It has many elements that are similar to their sister newspaper’s website in Knoxville. Here are my some of my favorite elements of their redesign.
As always, I’m sure it was tough getting the new pages up. If you checked out the site yesterday afternoon, you could witness that first hand as the out of date stories slowly came off the page and the new ads in filled the appropriate spaces. I just want to encourage their staff to hang tough as the criticism comes (it inevitably does with a redesign–people hate change). Eventually it will let up and everyone will realize that you’ve done a great job.
In Steve Outings latest The Stop the Presses column he looks at how newspapers are trying their hand at multimedia and experimenting with podcasts and vodcasts. I’ve never heard the term vodcast before, but from the context I can assume that it refers to a video based podcast for the new iPod with video. In his column, Steve discusses why newspapers should consider multimedia and looks at the way three different newspapers are going about creating podcasts and vodcasts.
Newspaper designer Mario Garcia is taking on the Wall Street Journal. In an attempt to squeeze the page size by 20 percent, they are discussing increased “fusion with the Internet.” The new design will include more web addresses, more info found on line, an index to individuals found in the newspaper and a fashion section. What will appear on Wall Street next?
A few days ago, I revealed my daily media diet. Today, I attempt to look at my weekly media diet. It’s a little harder for me to outline my weekly consumption than my daily consumption because it varies from week to week, but I’ve tried to give an overview of what I use on average. Interestingly, these are mostly websites.
I’m sure there are many, many more, but I can’t think of them right now.
I’ve spent some time this past week watching some of the Winter Olympics on TV. The events when people actually compete with each other instead of against the clock or a judge seem to interest me the most. Since the Olympics aren’t seen live on TV here in the U.S., I really have not gotten into who is going to win the gold and subsequently the medal race between countries. There’s something about the Olympics not being live that makes the whole broadcast seem extremely extremely packaged (which it is). I have really wondered if the commentary Bob Costas provides between events is written after he knows the outcome of the event or without that knowledge.
Lately, I’ve had a lot of people ask me how to create and publish a podcast. Even though I don’t have my own podcast, I understand the concepts of recording, editing, exporting to mp3, uploading to a server and creating a RSS feed to run my own podcast, but I don’t feel comfortable writing my own tutorial since I haven’t actually created one myself before.
So, I started looking for a really simple, straight forward podcasting tutorial and I found one on Yahoo’s new podcast site. It has links to all the downloads you might need and gives directions for PCs and Macs.
I might just try my hand at creating my own podcast.
Daniel Pulliam from the blog GetReligion
has written an interesting piece about why US newspapers respect Muslim’s wishes about using images of Muhammed, but ignore other religion’s wishes about displaying their sacred images in a less than perfect light.
In particular he notes that the US media has illustrated stories of the Muslim riots in the Middle East and Asia with paintings of the Virgin Mary smeared with elephant dung and anti-semetic caricutures while not displaying the cartoon that the riots are all up in arms about because they do not want to offend Muslims.
“It all comes down to the Fatwa, doesn’t it? Christians don’t issue them, Muslims do,” Pulliam concludes.
A federal government grants web site won’t work on Macs and grant seekers are being forced to use PCs to apply for research grants. An AP story on MSNBC said that 30 percent of the systems used by researchers at one university (Cleveland State) were Macs.
Normally, when you discuss accessibility, you think about making websites usable by those with disablities (like vision problems). When you don’t make your site accesible to users with disabilities, then you end up with something less than one or two percent of users being able to access the site. In this federal website’s case they have refused access to 30 percent of their users (on one campus– nationwide 5 to 10 percent). Either way, following accessiblity guidelines is a way to increase your audience.
“I love the Internet. Part fantasy, party community, and you get to pay your bills naked.”
–Must Love Dogs
(I wouldn’t recommend the movie, but this quote was pretty good)