A few interesting points in E-Consultancy's post 'Six things that annoy me about newspaper websites'. Only six?
Photo by Pingu1963 on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
1 Use of overlays
2 Rubbish site search
3 No comments on news stories
4 Slow comments approval
5 Audio plays automatically
6 No outgoing links
I agree about overlay ads; I visit more sites than I can't count each day and he newspaper sites are by far the worst culprits for nasty overlay ads that obstruct what the user wants to see. A consequence of unimaginative ad clients still stuck in dead tree world?
Audio turned up? There's no excuse for that. It's not work friendly.
Prompted by Martin Belam's newspaper site search smackdown - some sites aren't archiving their own headlines fast enough, which means it is more reliable to use a site specific search on Google or whoever. (I always use site specific search, regardless of the site: it's the shortcut in my browser and that uniform format is far easier when doing the volume of searches I do each day.)
Guardian.co.uk's search will be improved with the launch of our new blogs platform; blogs are currently on a standalone content management system, and so are not indexed with news stories. Half the blogs have already been moved over, including Lost In Showbiz.
Slow comment approval is a result of the volume of comments combined with the moderating process. Ironically, publishers become more liable for comments if they approve them and then publish the on their site, so in the name of speedy, fluid discussion and legal clarity, just let them go! That said, newspapers have been reluctant to introduce comments on stories at all because of that volume of extra work.
As for outgoing links - I think I'm redressing the balance on that front. But I'm sure there's plenty more to gripe about...
