One more time with feeling!
The folks who help create and maintain our Web sites are planning the future. OK, that's overly dramatic. They are in the process of setting strategic goals, determining where to focus, prioritizing problems to solve...that kind of stuff.
We have some ideas where things are broken (search, registration, navigability, for instance) and where we want to go, but only you can tell us if we're right. We are interested in the trifecta: doing good journalism, building the town square and making some money. Here are the questions that our Interactive leader sent out to some of us in the news operation. Please weigh in.
1. PLAYING CATCH-UP. Where are we sub-par? Fix what's broken. What are we behind on? What has to happen to get us on track? What do we have to accomplish in 2007?
2. KEEPING ON PACE. If we do nothing else to get ahead, and simply want to keep pace, what fundamentals do we need to do well? What are the daily, weekly, monthly SOP's we need to put in place to do our work well and improve our productivity? What do we have to accomplish in 2007?
3. BUILDING THE MARKET. What do we have to do to grow the audience, the business and the market? How do we define that goal more specifically? How do we become more innovative? What do we have to accomplish in 2007, and then over the next 2-3 years?
Comments (6)
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Is it just me, or has your website been running s-l-o-w the last couple of days? Seems to take forever to load pages.
Posted on July 13, 2006 1:39 PM
Great questions that EVERY serious web site should ask itself or its constituents. I'll try to be brief and will probably email my thoughts and TRY to keep it non-geeky (no promises). Where to send such email?
Posted on July 13, 2006 3:21 PM
Send them to me, Sue. I'll get them to the right owners. jrobinson@news-record.com
Posted on July 13, 2006 3:49 PM
"The folks who help create and maintain our Web sites are planning the future. OK, that's overly dramatic."
It's not a dramatic statement. Today, if your business (newspaper is a business) is not on the web, or not keeping up with the web, you don't have a business.
To answer your questions and I will be brief:
1. PLAYING CATCH-UP.
Don't. You shouldn't be catching up. You should be leading. Sure there are problems with the current site. Fix it and move on.
2. KEEPING ON PACE. Your core audiences are news junkies... obviously. Give them the news they want. Give them local news.
3. BUILDING THE MARKET. See answer for #2. Being more innovative does not equals to gaining more audiences if nothing else, you turn away your core audiences. The ‘be all to all’ strategy is nothing more than a bottomless pit.
Posted on July 14, 2006 12:18 PM
I would be very happy if I could cut from your site without having to highlight an entire article to do it. This drives me crazy. I've never seen it anywhere else.
Posted on July 15, 2006 12:49 PM
Mr. Boyd,
There are a number of issues in Internet Explorer that the News & Record Interactive design and development teams have on their list to fix with the news-record.com design, and we're working on re-architecting the design rather than trying to fix the problems individually. We have limited resources, and we'd prefer to spend them on a more complete solution instead of band-aid fixes.
In the meantime, you will likely have more luck copying text from the "printer friendly" version of articles (just click "Print the article", then "Cancel" when the printer dialog appears). Hate to push a work-around rather than a fix, but we'll get there.
Thanks!
Steve Paschall
User Experience Development Manager
Posted on July 17, 2006 9:34 AM