Website Of The Week – Online Mirror

http://www.mirror.co.uk/

The Mirror recently launched Online Mirror, an Internet version of the daily newspaper. The online site includes a selection of news and sports stories, as well as other ‘Mirror‘ features like Miriam’s ‘advice you can trust’ and Victor Lewis Smith’s supposedly ‘hilarious and controversial’ outlooks on life. Unfortunately the site does not seem to provide anything above and beyond that which is already featured in the paper. Whilst this doubtlessly makes the site easy to produce it also means that it serves no real purpose as the printed newspaper is a lot more readily available and a lot cheaper to access.

The Online Mirror news is fairly brief and insubstantial, the type of material which lends itself more to a light reading on the tube than to the Internet. Similarly, the few regular features on the site are hardly arresting: Russell Grant’s horoscopes are pretty well-trodden ground by now and ‘The Wright Stuff’ seem to be a thinly disguised ‘The Mirror Says’. Perhaps the most perplexing section is the reader’s letters ‘Dear Jo’ area which has a selection of particularly inane snippets from the Online Mirror reader’s lives.

In addition to the lack of substance in Online Mirror there is very little visually interest there. There is a fair amount of scope to make a Website diverting and engaging but Online Mirror has nothing but a couple of frames and scrolling bars on a red background. Furthermore, the links periodically point to the wrong section making navigating particularly confusing, and on occasion type sloppily crosses over from one frame to another. All in all, not very impressive when compared to some of the genuinely entertaining sites out there in cyberland.