Website Of The Week – Revolution

http://www.revolution.haynet.com/

The media planner’s new media reference guide is what Haymarket’s Revolution aims to be. As a natural extension from the printed title, the Revolution Website aims to provide services which it can’t do, or do as well, in the magazine. The result of this is essentially a number of databases. The site holds information on a large number of media and new media related companies, giving examples of clients and contact addresses. It also has a ‘One Year Plan’ feature that gives a year’s worth of events which might be notable to media planners (major sports/sponsor events, conferences, seminars, research and so on). The third database is a searchable recruitment facility which allows the user to search for new media jobs over job type and location.

In keeping with the site’s name, however, the heart of Revolution lies in the the open discussion forum ‘The Wall’. ‘The Wall’ is intended to be covered in writing by those wishing to discuss and debate any issues pertaining to the Internet and new media. Again, this is something which could not be effectively achieved in the printed title. The section was opened with an article by Gordon MacMillan about email spamming (promotional junk email) and has produced a few interesting responses so far. However, these things are particularly difficult to get off the ground.

Overall, although the site looks pretty impressive with plenty of moving images and good design, it would benefit from a little more content and advice on planning an expansion into the world wide web. It describes itself as agenda-setting but currently seems to lack the agenda; there is little comment and no articles. As the site is still only recently-launched, more content will presumably follow shortly.