45 Comments Add your own

• 1. Don at KTVB  |  October 25th, 2006 at 10:48 pm

  I think the Fisher redesigns (first KATU, now KOMO, and soon a station that I compete with) are fantastic. For a small company that doesn’t get a whole lot of respect, they’ve done a bang up job (with the folks at BIMedia.) Clean design, clean navigation.

  Within Belo - several sites have done some great work - Cory and his team at KING5 (namely John Goff & Dale Steinke) were a model for their northwest sisters; Rod and his team at KHOU knocked it out of the park as well.

• 2. Allen  |  October 26th, 2006 at 5:45 am

  I checked out a couple of the sites. I’m not an expert in the field of web page design, but it seems they tried to stuff everything they could on the homepage. Information overload? I wouldn’t call that a “clean” design.

• 3. thomas  |  October 26th, 2006 at 5:45 am

  yuck.

• 4. Jeremy  |  October 26th, 2006 at 6:15 am

  KHOU and KING5 certainly do a better job with the template than WWL-TV in New Orleans (wwltv.com). The layout they have on the front page - eh. But they were the test site for the new Belo layout, so maybe they’ll be tweaking it more with other sites now in the mix and possibly sharing design tips.

• 5. Jason  |  October 26th, 2006 at 7:05 am

  For a TV site, KING is extremely clean. I like the headings at the top of the page, and the pop down menus. Cleans things up big-time. And I like the “Interact” section. Nice to have all that stuff under one umbrella. I’m impressed with the 200+ comments on the “metronatural” blog entry! I’m intrigued by the idea of one newsroom blog, as opposed to individual blogs by some of those people. What’s the thinking there?

• 6. Safran  |  October 26th, 2006 at 7:47 am

  Why the embedded WindowsMedia video and not Flash?

• 7. Preston  |  October 26th, 2006 at 8:15 am

  Ick. I really dislike the big ad on the left column… and all the content got pushed down the page so that much of it is “below the fold”

• 8. Size Queen  |  October 26th, 2006 at 9:19 am

  Why is the video so small?

• 9. thelosangeleschannel  |  October 26th, 2006 at 9:20 am

  forget my own domain naming bias, but why in the heck these sites continue to rely on their call letters is a huge mistake.

  did belo not read that a large chunk of viewers are out of market?

  wwl vs. wwj? there is no simple defining logic in finding these sites. (wwl is mentioned as new orleans and wwj is a local tv/radio concern).

  these companies had better think hard about their “turf”…it is no longer a 60 mile radius.

  nice sites. have fun finding them on “the google”.

• 10. thomas  |  October 26th, 2006 at 10:18 am

  Safran - Trying not to spark another format wars discussion but there is nothing wrong with windows media video; and yes I know Flash has *easier* cross platform / browser support so it works well for those too dumb to get .wmv working on OS’s other than windows.

  thelosangeleschannel - hmm, i did a google search for houston area tv stations and KHOU came up #2 and kgw.com came up in second place also. You’re right though, it wasnt much fun finding them because it was too easy.

• 11. DetNews  |  October 26th, 2006 at 10:29 am

  A few points - 1) Why disable the BACK button? I never visit sites that do that. 2) Why are the Primetime listings all the way at the bottom. That is a key part of the stations. I’m sure more people watch your prime then news. 3) The GET FULL LISTING button takes me right back to the homepage. As for the design - nice, easy to use, but nothing grounding breaking. If’s amazing how the non-networked owned stations take more chances on the sites then the O&O’s.

• 12. Amanda  |  October 26th, 2006 at 10:44 am

  thelosangeleschannel, hmm, unlike king5.com - there’s no content on thelosangeleschannel.com and “the google” for “seattle tv” brings up KIRO, KING and KOMO on the first page.

• 13. thewashingtonchannel  |  October 26th, 2006 at 10:51 am

  how the heck did 2 stations come up in “2nd position”?

  i’ve always said leaving your audience to chance is a great strategy.

  just don’t put ” marks around “houston area tv stations” because none are mentioned.

  funny how your google submission is exactly what some refer to as DIRECT NAVIGATION. and funny too that cory mentioned something about brand extention in one of the posts just under this one.

  timely!

• 14. thomas  |  October 26th, 2006 at 10:56 am

  KHOU.com | News for Houston, Texas

• 15. Joe  |  October 26th, 2006 at 11:58 am

  When searching for news, do you say, “Hey, I’d better check the Google to see if there’s any “Houston area TV stations” with news”? Or do you say, “I hear there’s a man in Richmond accused of sexually assaulting a child. I’m gonna search the Google for stories about that”?

  I suspect, and my stats bear this out to a certain extent, that our web users aren’t doing a lot of searches for “local area tv news” when they want specific information.

• 16. thomas  |  October 26th, 2006 at 12:20 pm

  I was referring to a previous post regarding stations using call letters vs. thecitychannel.com nomenclature, not finding a specific story on a local site by searching google for a city and local news stations. Joe, I do love your speculation on your stats, either give speculation or give stats, just dont give speculation on stats, just doesnt seem correct.

• 17. thedetroitchannel  |  October 26th, 2006 at 2:02 pm

  amanda, thank you for looking!

  did i not say specifically “forget my domain naming bias”? yes, i did.

  but if you want to drag it into the conversation and compare a well-funded operation with a lunch money concept then have at it.

  you proved my point by googling one and directly navigating the other.

  thanks for the banter everyone!

  thomas, i think joe was agreeing with you. however, i found it funny how in one post you called the site “yuck” and then went gonzo defending it.

  stats or speculation?

• 18. Don  |  October 26th, 2006 at 2:13 pm

  Why on earth would we change to something hard to type and remember “thedetroitchannel.com” are you kidding?

  Fact is, people know these brands - KING5, KHOU, WWL, KTVB and KGW are all powerhouses in their market.

  That’d be like GE registering “thelightbulbcompany.com” or AT&T being “yourphonesource.com”

  Counter-intuitive - and verrrry 1998 thinking.

• 19. Don  |  October 26th, 2006 at 2:14 pm

  And one more point - we aren’t targeting people out of our market. We don’t sell advertisers on “hey, you can reach people in London!” We sell them on a local audience.

• 20. Rob  |  October 26th, 2006 at 2:22 pm

  The site design is … different … not overly exciting, but different. It’s good to refresh the site design every few years, but the real point of the website isn’t what it looks like but what it’s serving.

  It could look really pretty but have no substance whatsoever. Or it could be as ugly as, well, me after an all-night bender but have outstanding content.

  As a news consumer, I’ll choose the ugly site with the great content everyday of the week.

  Cory, please pass on my kudos to John Goff and Dale Steinke. I like how they took what BI offered them and migrated Seattle’s BI sites to the new version - ICE3 I assume - without losing any of BI-Seattle’s unique identity.

• 21. thetampachannel  |  October 26th, 2006 at 2:41 pm

  sure, don. better check your viewer stats.

  alot of your internet viewers are out of market. alot. i said over half, but don’t tell your local advertisers that.

  i mentioned this on another excellent blog (you know who you are) when the earthquake hit the Hawaiian Islands a few weeks back, thehawaiichannel.com served up 1,000,000 streams in a day or two. that’s impressive.

  with the power out around the islands it doesn’t take a genius to figure out those were NOT your local audience.

  “powerhouses in their markets”. now, THAT sounds like 1998.

  but, thanks again for the banter!!!

  i always enjoy learning how the other half thinks.

• 22. thetampachannel  |  October 26th, 2006 at 2:56 pm

  And one more point- thehawaiichannel.com just happens to also resolve to kitv.com (a local “powerhouse”).

  intuitive - and verrry 2006 thinking!

• 23. KITV Kid  |  October 26th, 2006 at 3:06 pm

  Tampa - you are off by an order of magnitude in your count of video streams on thehawaiichannel.com after the earthquake. It was 100,000 over two days. Not 1,000,000. Still, the website totally demolished its competition, includign the newspaper sites.

• 24. theboisechannel (coming VERY soon)  |  October 26th, 2006 at 3:27 pm

  i’ll have to refer to the hearst argyle site where i first read that. if wrong, you have my apologies.

  gee, that would be a first…somebody inflating a hit count?

  btw-congrats

• 25. invitedmedia  |  October 26th, 2006 at 4:57 pm

  i have an apology for everyone, but not for what you think!!!

  starbulletin (dot) com/2006/10/16/news/story11.html was the source of the “1,000,000 streams” i cited. it’s still on the hearst argyle site but you will have to dig a little… click “in the news” then in the nav bar “HTV in the news” if you prefer.

  it quotes someone from the station saying they’ll have 1,000,000 “hits” in a day.

  but as “kitvkid” points out: 100,000 or 1,000,000, that’s pretty damn good when the power is out.

  now, for my apology. last i looked theboisechannel.com was available for registering. i intended to register it so, in the near future, when these local news stations ALL move in this direction, i could have a good laugh with our buddy, “Don at KTVB”.

  how in the f was i suppose to know that the fine folks at JOURNAL BROADCAST GROUP saw fit to scoop it up (along with a boatload of others)? did i mention they are also smart as well as fine folks?

  my apology to everyone for assuming that GREAT domain name was still available.

• 26. Michael Gay  |  October 26th, 2006 at 7:34 pm

  If you want to get rid of the TV station branding in the URL, why would you keep “channel” in the URL? That seems as pointless as the call letters. I think everyone would agree “ChicagoNews.com” would be better than “TheChicagoChannel.com”

  BTW, if you type in “Chicago News” into the big 3 search engines, we come up number 2 usually.

• 27. Don at KTVB  |  October 26th, 2006 at 9:49 pm

  Well, channel folk(s?) - I understand why you so stridently defend the “blankchannel.com” model - the same way I defend calls.

  Bottom line – your advertisers aren’t trying to reach people out-of-market.

  Stations that do “blankchannel.com” usually don’t have a strong platform to stand on, and would rather start over. That may be fine for them. But I agree with Michael - if you have to go that route, wouldn’t you be better off as “blanknews.com?” Channel says NOTHING to your audience.

  It is about building a brand for your LOCAL audience - not trying to start from scratch with thelightbulbchannel.com. If the world was going to move in this direction, it would have happened by now. 1998 is over… welcome to 2006.

  Oh, and feel free to google Boise news sometime.

• 28. Steve Safran  |  October 26th, 2006 at 9:51 pm

  Excellent point Michael. I would also point out that this is a good opportunity to remind that people search *story* keywords. What matters most in search is how searchable your headlines and text are, not whether you’ll come up when someone searches “Boston Television news websites.”

  I’ve stopped trying to debate the other matter. It’s up to every station to determine for itself what its website’s brand is. In cities where the call letters are associated with news and information, they should be a part of the URL. Others should start fresh.

  Some stations throw away perfectly good brands and use a channel number and the network’s name, which is by far the biggest mistake. What does a channel *number* mean on TV anymore, let alone online? A station may have a VHF channel number, an analog cable box number, and a different digital cable box number in every community for its regular and hi-def channels. Oh - and satellite, too.

  When it comes to naming sites, there is certainly no one-size-fits-all solution.

• 29. Steve Safran  |  October 26th, 2006 at 9:56 pm

  PS: Having ranted all that, I have no problem with the KING5.com URL. Obviously, KING is a popular word so they needed the 5 for the URL. I\’m more annoyed by the NBS3.com URLs of the world (I believe Studio 60 is on that network…) which tell me absolutely nothing about who or where the site is. Local news sites are local, not network.

• 30. Cory  |  October 27th, 2006 at 12:48 am

  The one thing I’ll add on the name issue, from KING 5’s perspective, is highly regarded and widely recognized in the Seattle market. In fact, compared to most markets, it’s off the charts.

• 31. thebeijingchannel  |  October 27th, 2006 at 5:44 am

  i went to bed before michael gay commented so i never got a chance to respond;

  MG, i think cbs2chicago is a great domain naming strategy…just look at the yahoo screen grab steve or cory posted above… it says cbsDENVER.

  how much more top of mind can you get?

  whatever happened to that one young lady who commented here some time back from cbsboston?

  now, for having asked to “forget my domain name bias” way back up in comment #9 we seemed to have strayed way off course…generated some good debate…and as far as i am concerned it’s time to move on.

  thanks again for all the banter EVERYONE!

• 32. Chris Way  |  October 27th, 2006 at 7:42 am

  I hate to say it, because I am really found of Belo Interactive, but it looks like the designs were a battle between news and sales, and sales clobbered news.

  I like the fact that weather is placed in a prominent position, but the way it is designed, it looks like a banner ad.

  I agree with others regarding too much whitespace above the content and pushing the top story so far down.

  How about most e-mail, most viewed, or “most relevant” stories?

• 33. Anon  |  October 27th, 2006 at 8:55 am

  I’ll have to agree with Chris Way on that — especially on the KHOU site (news? oh, yeah we have links to six stories, but look at all the pretty ADS and FEATURES we have!!! vote on the elephant’s name!)

  Plus KHOU is too feature-y; I’d rather select from a menu of headlines like KING.

  overall, WAY better than the previous layout

• 34. Joe  |  October 27th, 2006 at 9:39 am

  Thomas, feel free to prove me wrong. Then we can consider whatever is is that you deem “correct,” which I “suspect,” isn’t very “correct.”

• 35. thomas  |  October 27th, 2006 at 11:24 am

  “sure” Joe, not really sure what you would like me to prove “correct” because I don’t think I posted anything that was “incorrect” that wasn’t my opinion. I still stand behind my “yuck” comment because that is the best way I can describe it.

• 36. Michael Gorman  |  October 27th, 2006 at 1:14 pm

  But if people are coming in from outside the market, wouldn’t they be coming in via a search engine? If so, why would they care if it’s WNEV.com or theneverlandchannel.com? Meanwhile, your viewers have to stop and think what each station in the market calls their Web site. If you can get a good NeverlandNews.com or similar domain, then do it, but trading out the call letters for the actual word “channel” seem like selling your pot to buy a kettle.

  And I agree with Chris and previous commenters. Left-column ads are great for the clients, bad for the viewers.

  But any attempt at customization, at least in my opinion, is a very good thing.

• 37. Dale  |  October 27th, 2006 at 1:30 pm

  I hope you’re getting some big time revenue with those large ads, on the side and top as well as the pop-up.

• 38. Joe  |  October 28th, 2006 at 11:29 am

  Your “yuck” is fine. Nobody has a problem with “yuck.” I maintain that you get more searches from story-specific keywords that “local area tv news channel” keywords. I get “local city news” keywords and the value in those, but nobody says “I need to get my local area tv news channel from the Internets. Guess I’ll go to the Google and see what I get.” They seem to be more interested in stories about “last ford taurus”, “harold ford jr. political ad” or “atlanta circumsicion trial”. That’s what I’d rather target in local search keyword strategy.

• 39. thomas  |  October 30th, 2006 at 6:12 am

  Joe, I was referring to Theloseangleschannels.com comment, “nice sites. have fun finding them on “the google”.” They may not have a nice hip, fuax web2.0 name like theminneapolischannel.com but they were easily found using google and a simple search of “Houston area tv stations”, where they came up # 2 in the results. Now if you still have a doubts or want to continue to argue about this great, just let me know.

• 40. free webcam community&hellip  |  March 9th, 2007 at 3:02 pm

  accidental oops pics…

  true anal virgins first time…

• 41. Anonymous  |  March 11th, 2007 at 5:51 pm

  The new Belo sites suck. The downward spiral of hits on their websites point to that

• 42. campioni  |  March 15th, 2007 at 9:35 pm

  um… buoni, realmente buoni luogo e molto utile;)

• 43. Markos  |  August 9th, 2007 at 8:28 am

  Cool…

• 44. Drymiotes  |  August 12th, 2007 at 5:37 am

  Nice

• 45. MOJO  |  January 18th, 2008 at 6:02 am

  Wow, thanks for the excellent information!

Leave a Comment

Trackback this post  |  Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed