As a side not, this highlights one of the problems of today's society. We have so many choices available that choosing just one comes down to picking at small, insignificant things, and we get so caught up in the process of choosing that we forget how lucky we are to have any of the choices in the first place.
The second website to analyse, 'The Sydney Morning Herald', is a comprehensive, accessible news source detailing stories that locals would be interested in. The layout is fairly small, to fit as many news stories into the one page without scrolling down as possible, which is a plus. It doesn't particularly interest me however as I am not a Sydney local, and the stories are too small-scale ('child injured' 'suspect collared' 'profit wins' etc) to incite much interest in anyone who isn't. The targeted audience: adult Sydneysiders of any income.
'The Conversation' is too academic for my taste. 'Unlocking university expertise', 'new study challenges exoplanet doubts', 'political staffers aren't killing the public service' etc. I've never heard of an exoplanet before. I don't know what political staffers are. I'm not going to use a site if I have to keep looking up words.
For intelligent people though, the site looks like a comprehensive source of interesting news and information, with an aesthetically pleasing photo-to-text ratio.
The target audience: people more intelligent than myself, with scholarly interests.
'The Global Mail' has too much scrolling for too few news stories. It doesn't even have that many news stories on the first page and I can't see an option to load more. As it's slogan says, it's targeted at 'independent minds' ('Independent journalism for independent minds') which probably means younger uninfluenced people.
That's 5 seconds up. Next.
'The Telegraph' has a good layout; it starts off with a large photo/news story that changes every few seconds, and then underneath are smaller news stories with small photos and a few lines of summary, and then at the bottom of the page are lines of just text. So it's actually an inverted pyramid.
There is an abundance of tabs and links, and the addition of the weather on top of the home page is good. This site is effective. It's not exciting, but adequate. It's targeted at the same audience as 'The Sydney Morning Herald'.
I can't say the same for 'ABC News'. The text is small, the site looks cheap and there is a huge photo of some guy looking stoned on the front. It's main focus is on politics, which doesn't interest me. Most likely targeted at politically-minded adults. 5 seconds.
'The Huffington Post' engaged me the most out of all these sites. For one, it's name is 'The Huffington Post'. Secondly it has an abundance of articles on a variety of subjects, with a great photo-to-text ratio. It's accessible and interesting. It is also separated into columns; the middle column feature politics, the right hand side is for social media and the left hand side features blog posts about interesting issues. Target audience: probably younger people. I bookmarked it.
'Crikey' is also a site that I bookmarked. It has a range of articles (politics, business, media, culture, technology', a really interesting, eye-catching layout and like 'The Telegraph' it also utilises the inverted pyramid. Target audience: younger Australian people.
In conclusion, 'The Huffington Post' and 'Crikey' are the most engaging sites in my opinion, with 'The Australian Institute' and 'ABC News' coming last.
No comments:
Post a Comment