They could have tested the waters before jumping in by making one of the features (like sports or weather) of their old site run as this layout/technology to see if it works.

The biggest issue for me is not the home page but the ’story’ page. As commented earlier, I had no idea there was text below the video when I went to it.

It’s a classic scroll-blocker layout. Users have no reason to think there is more content below the scroll in the layout.

good to hear from you.

This makes the classic, unfortunate mistake of thinking its job is to promote the newscast. The site could have worked - I like the player and could see myself engaged with it. It’s clean. However, the amount of self-promotion here untenable. I am assaulted with station messages on every page. When I went to the KABC local news page (I should have to go “inside” for local news?) I was greeted with a giant ad for their Doppler Mega 7 Whosiwhatsis Weather Thingie.

The RSS choices are limited and some are downright bizarre - I can subscribe to an RSS feed for the pages “About WABC-TV,” “About Digital TV and HDTV” and “Interact with WABC TV.” Really? That’s just someone not paying attention to their own feeds.

We are not looking for promos, we’re looking for information. There is no demand for the volume of self-promotion the stations either think we should have or want us to have. This uses the site in a profoundly TV-centric way that cuts itself off at the knees.

Answer the fundamental question: Why would I return to this site? For more promos?

Decent technology, but I feel for the web team here. This was obviously driven by marketing and not a desire for a successful online business.

I could see their video hits going up, but what about overal traffic? What is their business model? Have they given up on page views and impressions completely? If so, this is a poor way to do it.

Do they even know who their audience is? Most of the traffic comes during the day when people are at work. Are users really going to go for a video-heavy site while giving off the appearance of working?

Maybe they figure they’re alreay losing audience, and that the pool of news outlets is so vast already that instead of competing with that same news, they offer an “alternative.”

Then again, the web audience is so fickle that maybe the ABC sites will take off. I just don’t see it.

No ONE who has any clue about news had anything to do with this design or they would realize just how RARELY a breaking news story has good “art” or images to go with.

(And, thoughout a day, breaking news is basically all you have for a site — or is all you SHOULD have.)

Instead, much of the time there are logos, generic “murder” with crime scene tape images or B-roll of the outside of a building.

Did anyone AT ALL think that the pictures in this GIANT TV screen about 90 percent of the time will NOT be compelling AT ALL?

Designers are great — but they usually are unplugged from reality.

This point of mine about images being crappy is really the tip of the iceberg of how bad this overall site is.

Disaster.

But, I feel like I just can’t… get… to… the… story. The first thing I did, once I found it, was to compress the big Flash window down to a size that didn’t obscure half my screen. It’s even more annoying when you click a story and you have to scroll beyond the Flash window to begin reading a story.

In my experience, people who visit TV sites (or news sites as a whole, for that matter) are “scanners.” You quickly scan the top stories for anything that’s interesting, maybe glance at the most popular stories, and move on. These sites, with the big Flash window, are not conducive to scanning at all. It forces me to click around to figure it out. And users aren’t going to waste their time doing that.

Also, while I’m a big fan of video, I wouldn’t advocate forcing a video-based design on a news site when only 5-10 percent of a site’s traffic originates from video. There’s a balance. Eventually, video will have a bigger share of clicks, but in the meantime, if you overforce it, traffic will plummet.

The site itself (looking at KABC) - rather nice looking aesthetics wise. They could add more content though - heavy on flash stuff, light on the news.

Have fun fishing

i’d love to get into a full blown debate over this topic but we are going spear fishing w/ some local guys this morning.

is lr still following the pending marriage of google founder lp?

aloha!

i’m not that smart to figure out what the industry will settle on, but my thought is these will eventually be your station’s web channel and all “pages” will be different screens.

too simple?

i’m still counting on an early adoption of this switch within the next 5 months.

In this case, the player, while pretty darn big, is still an element on a page. It is not a standalone player. Are you saying we should not call sites “sites” and pages “pages?”

talk about 1999 w/ 2007 technology.

if the web ain’t tv, why is everybody tieing their web channel(s) directly to their “4-letter random search result” (including my dear neighbors on o’ahu @ thehawaiichannel.com)?