An Extreme Webover for Examiner.ie

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The Irish Examiner is a tired old spinster. She could be so much more. It’s time to smarten and tart her up a little. Her purple themed dress is an appalling assault on the eyes. Here’s a knockup of where I think the Examiner should go in concept. 

Eliminate wasted space and links

The Examiner’s site wastes an incredible amount of space to the left and right of the content pane. This coupled with duplicated jump links to the Ireland, World, Sport and Business pages leaves the template of each and every page hopelessly cramped. Why duplicate in and squeeze the text? The Examiner webteam should bin the duplication, it doesn’t promote jumping from one landing page to the next.

Expanding the nav bar and using your deck images as teaser in the sidebar cleans up the user interface. Short text decks could be interspersed with image decks to mix things up. 

Cut down sidebar pimpage

There are three sidebars in the current Examiner theme. While we are binning the duplication links, it makes sense to bin at least one of them. The remaining ones should be expanded to include decent-sized images, text and advertising. 

Get back to colour roots

I don’t understand the meaning of the purple theme and accenting that the Examiner site has in place. Why purple? Why not red? The Examiner is Cork through and through. How about a muted red? Perhaps a little different from the Irish Times scarlet? 

Legibility is vital

The font in the current Examiner theme is just way to small to be significant. Readability is impaired. How about boosting the size of the font. We’ve got more screen real estate now, how about we make us of it? Helvetica, Verdana or Corbel would look good. Generous spacing between lines would help speed readers too. 

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Be more visual

Pictures on the present site look old and tired. Fresh vibrant images would spice up user experience so much more. Dimensions of the images on the site also appear to be an afterthought, or perhaps that’s the default size that the images as per the CMS working behind the scenes. 

This should be followed through with advertising too. Ads should not be embarrassing smattering sprinkled all over the site, rather they should bold and big enough to impact the reader. There’s nothing wrong with advertising done with grace and taste. The present site adds sidebars and top nav advertising to encase and belittle the content. Bad move. My eyes should be able to easily read the news article. 

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Build web content

In my knockup, I’ve added two new sections Blogs and Store. Every modern newspaper worth it’s salt has staff or guest bloggers building up unique content. The Guardian, in particular, prides itself as a paper with a vibrant blogging voice.

Examiner entice us with your news content, but make us stay about to read thought-provoking blog posts. Having a Store on the site is a great idea. Want to order a paper as a birthday present for someone or how about a copy of a memorable photo you saw on the site?

Be more social

Most newspapers nowadays have buttons on each article allowing users to share the stories by bookmarking them or emailing them to friends. Why hasn’t the Examiner site jumped on this? It’s a simple add to make. And the wish beyond wishes would be opening news articles to reader comments. Wouldn’t that be a great addition to the Examiner site? 

The search story

The current Examiner search is woeful. Beyond woeful. When you attempt to search a keyword from the main site you are sent to another page to search the TCM archives. You then run your search query again against this page. That’s a search step one too many.

The search itself is flaky and if you are returned results, you’ll find yourself spat out onto a result page that is monetised using Google Ads. Google Ads on a search result page of a national newspaper? Dear God. It’s like being invited over to a friends house and all of a sudden being charged per second of conversation after asking them a question. Because that’s what the Examiner are doing. When you are reading their content, they are inviting you into their home – their house of discoveries, opinions and ideas. I don’t want to be charged for asking a question, do you? 

Search needs to be beefed up and those Ads gone. Perhaps the addition of a most popular stories or a tag-cloud for related subjects could work here too? 

The makeover Inside

The Examiner site really needs a facelift, from the inside out. It would be nice to see content from her sister papers’ aggregated along side her own. Leveraging ready-made local news is a no-brainer. It would drive more web clicks to those paper sites and vice-versa. That’s great for web traffic. Increased web traffic to those sites would drive up their SEO as people share those links too. More traffic could give the paper honchos more power to control advertising rates across sister papers too, right? 

The truth is, that the Examiner’s site makeover needs to reflect fresh thinking about its content. The makeover needs to happen in the minds of its progenitors to drive a mixed-media approach to its content and to its family of papers.

December 14th, 2008 at 7:47 pm • Filed in Geekery



Comments

5 Comments to “An Extreme Webover for Examiner.ie”

  1. Niall Harbison Says:
    December 14th, 2008 at 8:27 pm

    Excellent post, Really good thinking and hopefully highlighting how woeful their site is will wake them up! I could design a blog that looks better than that :) Great work and I agree with TT being on the front page!



  2. Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » Fluffy Links - Monday December 15th 2008 Says:
    December 15th, 2008 at 5:14 am

    [...] has done a makeover for the Examiner’s gawful website. Looks way better [...]



  3. Little Links - Monday December 15th 2008 | Joe Scanlon Says:
    December 15th, 2008 at 8:53 am

    [...] Alexia gives de paper a great makeover. [...]



  4. Nick McGivney Says:
    December 15th, 2008 at 12:10 pm

    Excellent. I’d read it. So why not just go the whole hog and put it together! The Alexia Examiner. The content’s way cooler and I’d much rather read about Texas Tay strikes in Roscommon than this effing refeffion we’re in.

    Now you simply have to get everyone to become a correspondent and wait for the ad revenue to flood…



  5. The Sexy Pedestrian Says:
    December 15th, 2008 at 4:19 pm

    So much easier on the eye, their current site looks like a student web design project.



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