11 Comments Add your own

• 1. 5w30  |  March 10th, 2007 at 4:08 pm

  You then oughta like the NY Daily News site redesign.
  Lots more white space.
  And easy-to-find VIDEO! Pretty good for a newspaper.
  (Compare that to a television station’s site like the crappy WNBC.com, where you have a hard time finding video … and on weekends can’t find any new local video due to the fact it’s hubbed by the IBS folks) … Lame.

• 2. Michael Rosenblum  |  March 10th, 2007 at 4:30 pm

  bravo. Make a template and they will follow. Trust me.

• 3. Z  |  March 11th, 2007 at 6:13 pm

  Must be nice to only need two advertisements on the home page to pay for it. I’m afraid many TV sites haven’t any idea what that’s like.

• 4. Safran  |  March 11th, 2007 at 9:25 pm

  Z: Glad you brought that up. I hear a lot how TV sites need tons of slots for homepage ads. This is nonsense. Homepage ads are a lousy way to make money. And they so clutter a page that they drive eyeballs away.

  It’s not HOW MANY ads you sell in bulk, and certainly not how many you sell on a homepage. That’s 1.0 thinking. “How many pageviews we can mass” is 1.0 as well.

  Being smarter about ad sales actually means fewer slots on the front. Two slots does not need to mean just two ads. It can mean hundreds of targeted, contextual ads. (Look at Google Adsense.) The rates go up considerably if you can tell the advertiser to whomathe ads are targeted and how well they’re targeted.

  Make a smart and clean web presence with video classifieds, paid search and RSS ads and you won’t need a technicolor yawncoat for a front page. Have lots of niche channels. Go vertical, with health and politics mini-sites. Your station isn’t your website isn’t your station. Build a communications business with the web as a distribution channel and suddenly you’ll have a profitable web 2.0 business, instead of being in the tile business.

• 5. The Tony  |  March 11th, 2007 at 9:43 pm

  I love clean design. That’s so nice…

  …sadly, it will never, ever happen at my station. We still have that terrible “confuse them into having to click a thousand links to find something until they’ve forgotten about what they originally were searching for” mentality going.

  Even MORE sadly, we’re in no way the worst offender.

  Many years from now, when people who actually grew up with the Internets are firmly in charge, and all the dinosaurs have been shoved off the cliff into the tarpits in which they deserve to boil…

  …maybe THEN we’ll have more focus on the web from the ground up, as opposed to tacked-on crap cluttering up an already-cluttered site.

  Until we get to the day when the strategy is no longer, “Throw a lot of crap at the wall and see what sticks,” those looking for something worthwhile out there will have to look to forward-thinking sites for guidance and truth.

  Thank you, Lost Remote. I’m not worthy to bathe in your urine.

• 6. Liz Foreman  |  March 11th, 2007 at 10:42 pm

  thank goodness it’s easier to enter the caption contest!

• 7. Barney Lerten  |  March 11th, 2007 at 10:56 pm

  OK, I’m going to nervously raise my hand here and say I think we at KTVZ.com have done a pretty good job so far for a very small-market TV station of keeping things clean. It’s NOT perfect, for sure, but .. not bad, I believe.
  We’re about to move to the WorldNow platform and will endeavor mightily to KEEP things clean and not go with a lot more clutter (also adding their nice embedded Flash video player, for example.) We do plan to offer as much video (important and wacky) from as many sources as possible - I mean, we’re TV for goodness sake!;-)
  It’s like Krug of ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ fame says - keep the Web design committee from overrunning common sense, and you have a good shot. I think;-)

• 8. Liz Foreman  |  March 11th, 2007 at 11:03 pm

  also, i LOVE the search/most read/recent, etc. box. those are all search-y features! that’s such an obvious placement but most people don’t attach them to the search box (because the last phase of redesigns used horizontal nav search.)

  another thing about that search text area, they use SEMICOLONS! anyone remember those? go new yorker. show the web what punctuation is all about! and i’m not making fun…despite this terribly-written comment, i am a fan of proper punctuation.

  one last note…it seems that tabs are OUT in this white space redesign cycle? i haven’t seen them in any recent big media redesigns. that was quick; the short, short homepage gives way to the long, long homepage.

• 9. thedetroitchannel  |  March 12th, 2007 at 5:51 am

  if those “2 ads or 20 on the homepage aren’t relevant to ME then they are useless.

  did i mention that i have “local interests” in about 4 cities these days, but when i’m in detroit i’d like to see ads from my local merchants…no matter what content i’m reading.

  rather than contextual advertising i lean toward the geographic.

  how tough would that be? i guess swallowing your pride would be the toughest since that would require some sort of revenue sharing.

• 10. Sophocles  |  August 15th, 2007 at 12:41 pm

  Cool!

• 11. Yioryios  |  September 17th, 2007 at 3:13 am

  Sorry

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