April 3, 2007 at 2:54 pm
5 Ideas in 50 Minutes
Recently, the editor of an AAN paper asked for suggestions on improving his paper’s website. I received permission to blog my answer to him - so that we all could offer ideas.
Above the fold
“Above the fold” is a term leftover from print newspaper days, but it has relevance in the online world, where users rarely scroll down the homepage to view additional content. [See Poynter’s EyeTrack Studies.]
So what’s visible above the fold? Navigation, ad content, a rotating story/image teaser, a link to the cover story, and 3 upcoming events.
What’s below the fold? Tons of articles, more ad content, and listings search engines.
Five Quick Ideas for Improving this Site
1. Revamp the ‘above the fold’ space on the homepage. Move search for events and restaurants into a prominent position. Shrink the size of the rotating image (if it is kept), and add navigational elements that allow readers to flip back to the 3rd or last image they saw.
2. Make it a conversation. Add commenting functionality to articles. Consider displaying user comments on your homepage or on the section fronts to let readers know their voices are being heard. Including “bloggers linking here” links from technorati on articles.
3. Write headlines for the web. “Lonely Rose,” “Hay Ride,” and “Fuzzy Math” are clever headlines that work well in print layouts with images and subheads as context clues, but to readers who scan online, they don’t contain enough information. (Nor are they particularly search engine friendly.)
4. Invest in events listings. It can be a tremendous amount of work on the backend, but users expect the robust events listings functionality that they can find from sites as varied as Pollstar, Upcoming.org, and Eventful. I could only find 1 music event on this site, but I know there are many in the print edition.
5. Consider a ‘daily’ content strategy. This one is a toughie. But no matter how well designed a site of Thursday’s content is, it will be old hat to readers on Tuesdays. Brainstorm ways to get material on the website daily - publishing syndicated or feature stories online before they are printed, for example. Create robust events listings that feature ‘things to do today’ on the homepage every day.
Does anyone else have ideas for improving this website? What has worked for you?
Tags: content, design, improvements
Matt Writt:
April 4, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Re: #5 Daily content:
Indeed it is a toughie. On memphisflyer.com we have “The Buzz,” which is daily content (not neccessarily ever printed) that displays 3 headlines “above the fold.”
It took a while for our editoral staff to get the hang of posting several of these daily, because a commitment to daily content is a big one.
Now that we’ve got the hang of it, there are 5-10 new items per day, posted throughout the day. To me the fact that we post throughout the day gives us the leg-up on our local daily, who posts a day’s worth of content in the morning that stays unchanged all day (basically dumping their paper on the website, wholesale).
While challenging, I think that daily content is worthwhile for an alt site (especially those trying to build traffic to sell web ads) and there are certainly some good strategies for generating this content without over-straining the editorial staff.
Matt Writt
The Memphis Flyer
Elaine Clisham:
April 5, 2007 at 3:59 pm
Re #1, making non-news stuff bigger:
So here’s the key question: What “jobs,” in Newspaper Next lingo, are people coming to your Web site to get done? I suggest there are four primary ones:
1. News;
2. Shopping;
3. Events/things to do;
4. Social networking;
We’re so used to the holdover idea from the print product that all the real estate above the fold has to be for news that we forget about how important all the other jobs are. So if your objective is to build your audience(s) by being a local information portal, why not consider an entry page with different “doors” through which people can enter, depending on which job they’ve come to get done?
Some examples:
Savannah Morning News
Franklin Covey. Mouse over the photos.
Layouts like this leave room for news headlines if you still want to include those, but they make your Web site much easier to navigate for content other than news. And a lot of traffic and advertising is focused on that other content.
Elaine Clisham
American Press Institute
Roxanne Cooper:
April 6, 2007 at 5:40 am
Does the evidence show that “doors” increase or reduce pageviews/stickiness?
Jason Joyce:
April 8, 2007 at 9:52 pm
I think alt websites face a challenge that dailies don’t for this exact reason: We’re trying to showcase articles, advertising, community features AND listings on that above-the-fold home page space. Add daily content to the weekly paper stuff and it’s even more of a challenge.
We push the paper stuff down the page during the beginning of the week, giving the daily stuff more prominence. We also feature the “tools” our site/paper are known for on every page in a box that allows people to find movie times, restaurants and music listings.
But I think the problem that might be creeping in as a result of all this is what happens when you try to be all things to all people and it might be that our priorities on the home page will begin to be dictated by what gives us the best chance for making decent money. We still get almost half of our traffic in our Forum, and that traffic doesn’t seem to care much about the home page at all.
Roxanne Cooper:
April 9, 2007 at 12:10 am
Here’s another question:
Does anyone in AAN “daypart” their homepage, based on what their readers are look for during different parts of the day (i.e. news in the morning, things to do in the afternoon)?
LauraFries.com:
April 9, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Jason - I agree that there can be too much attention paid to ‘above the fold’ on the homepage during redesign projects.
It is important to note that a substantial amount of traffic ‘comes through the backdoor’ … via a link or a Google search, a user’s first glance at your site will be an article-level page. Can that person easily navigate to all tools, content, community features and ad content from that page? Yikes, that’s a design challenge.
And yes, when we get to the point where clicks drive content placement and design, we get into a nasty place indeed. [Observant news junkies will remember how Anna Nicole dominated CNN.com for months - and we all know how many clicks that pictures of cute puppies get online.]
It’s a delicate balance. But fortunately, work can go on implementing suggestions 2, 3, 4, and 5 while we noodle #1.
Murray:
April 10, 2007 at 8:19 am
I wonder how true it is that people don’t scroll. I’ve been talking to some agencies recently and they have all reported that page heights are getting longer and longer because the website publishers have statistics that show people do scroll down. I’m not saying that it’s the majority, it’s definently true that items above the fold get more attention, but people do scroll. Our Rich Media ads is below the fold and it gets a lot of click throughs. Also, what is below the fold on-line? That depends on the monitor resolution and monitor size of the person viewing the page.
For instance last month on the Atlanta Creative Loafing site 51% were 1024×768 and 13% were 1280×1024. Those resolutions will display a lot especially if it’s a 19″ monitor.