Web Review – Channel 5
Following a brief foray into the online world in February 1997, Channel 5 returned to the internet proper last weekend with the launch of its new website. Prior to the launch of the new site, C5 was the only remaining terrestrial broadcaster not to have an online offering.
The new site reflects the Channel 5 brand pretty well: it’s colourful and vibrant with things flashing around and it has the official site of Melinda Messenger embedded right in there as well. The site’s homepage appears as a living room with a TV in the centre; from here you can move around the different areas – TV listings, programme overview, Channel 5 Unleashed and, of course, the buxom bombshell, MM.
Channel 5 have been a little lazy with their listing section, though. Whilst it gives you the option of choosing the TV schedules from a very comprehensive list of channels, the search then moves out of the C5 site to Flextech Interactive’s SceneOne to get the information. This means that the SceneOne website opens within the Channel 5 frame; for the technically-interested this causes the other SceneOne links not to work because they are in the wrong frameset. The upshot of this is that it doesn’t look very impressive to see ‘The requested URL was not found’ popping up all over the place. SceneOne was reviewed a on Newsline a couple of weeks ago (see Website Of The Week – SceneOne).
There is also no news section on the site, despite Channel 5 News being one of the broadcaster’s success stories. The Headlines link in the section about Channel 5 News just opens up the ITN homepage.
The best bits of the Channel 5 site are programme spin-off games and features. The Fantasy 5 game is pretty good – choosing a team of eleven Sunset Beach characters who will then score points for their different actions in the soap opera. Every time Vanessa says “Oh Michael” – her catch phrase, apparently – you’ll score 10 points. If one of your characters becomes embroiled in a punch-up/cat-fight you’ll earn yourself 25 points. The prize is a trip to Barbados to live life like the Sunset Beachers – fantastic.
C5 also claims to have pioneered the first online soap opera – Drizzle Beach. The action of Drizzle Beach seems to centre around the delightfully-named Clare Smegby and her potential love interest, Dave. Clare is being taught how to eat chips properly by her mates, and there seems to be a corrupt fishing contest in there somewhere as well, as far as I could make out. This is much further up my street than Sunset Beach; it reminds of a classy weekend in Filey back in ’83…
These parts of the website are fun and entertaining – C5’s primary objective – and the site is colourful, fast and easy to move around. There are also chat rooms, some business information and, oddly, a selection of fact sheets and booklets on subjects like gardening and art.
Unfortunately, the website is let down by some sloppy design in terms of layout. There are a couple of pages where the text disappears off the bottom of the screen in the middle of a sentence without any scroll bar to move down the page. Also, for some reason, a lot of the links don’t always work no matter how hard you click on them. All in all, though, a fun website which does reflect Channel 5’s young, energetic and entertaining approach to broadcasting.