The College View Website
Instead of reviewing the same newspaper websites and finding the same old results, i.e. that Irish papers still lag behind and the Guardian’s web designers should all be Knighted, I decided to see how DCU’s own web editors fare.
Firstly The College View must be congratulated for the massive overhaul of the website compared to last year. Last year the website consisted merely of a pdf version of the paper that took days be updated and had all the drawbacks of any Adobe driven document. Instead the paper now contains all the elements that make online editions so successful.
You can now comment on each of the articles adding layers of interactivity that were not there before. Another advantage of online editions has already been shown this year also. When an article was show to have been highly inaccurate it was immediatly taken down.
It also containes various other simple features that allow for a more rounded experience such as catagorising articles by section aswell as the edition in which they were published. In comparison to the website of the other main college newspapers, Trinity News and (UCD’s) University Observer , The College View website is far less polished. All the same features are there however but considering that its its first year and is staffed by one person it holds it own.
I really enjoyed reading Ronán’s post. Sometimes, when expressing an opinion on a news site, it feels as though it is a mere drop in the ocean. Your printed words are all that remains and they can either be headed or ignored. However, with the College View, we can actually make a difference. If the interactivity is poor, improve it! If there is a lack of hyperlinks, make them! We have the power to make this newspaper a shining example of journalism’s integration with the Internet.
[...] a comment » After reading Ronan’s post regarding the online version of The College View, I decied to visit the CV site and ended up on [...]
DCU’s Flashback “online” « Trudilol’s Blog said this on May 2, 2009 at 5:07 pm |
You make a fair point about the CV’s website not being fully polished – and as the person behind making it – I couldn’t agree more. But just to point out, where Trinity and UCD are using templated websites with many others that look exactly the same – we decided to start off as we wanted to go on, with a website that has a COMPLETELY distinct look.
And yes, over summer, we will be overhauling the site.