Website Of The Week – The Independent
Although The Independent‘s website receives fewer visitors than any of the other national newspaper’s online versions (according to their own statement), it is probably the best-designed and clearest of all those sites on offer on the Net at the moment (much like the printed daily paper holds a smaller readership than the other broadsheets but, in my opinion, its new design makes it the best-looking newspaper on the stands).
Drawing on the ethos of the paper’s design, the website presents a clear and very well-coordinated interface to the site’s various areas and sections. The colour schemes and codings are effective and the screens remain uncluttered and easier to understand; there is a clear sense of design-style running throughout the site’s sections.
The content of the site is pretty much as the newspaper but with the bonus of allowing access to back-issues of the paper’s ‘+’ supplements. The bulk of the main frame contains UK, International and Business news, as well as Letters, Columnists and Comment. The main gripe with these is that summaries of the stories are listed in a column down the length of the page. This means that you have to fiddle with the scroll bar a lot to see all of the stories available; indexes of the stories’ headlines would be a good idea to prevent this. It would also lend the site a little more added value if there was some material which did not already appear in the newspaper; as it stands the stories are slightly edited versions of those which appear in the press.
One way that sites of this sort can really utilise the medium of the internet is to offer a rolling news service, on which news stories are updated throughout the day. This, of course, requires significant extra resources but would add utility to the site. Also, there is no archive of news stories so if you miss it you miss it. This is a shame because, again, the web is particularly suited to logging large amounts of accessible information.
The paper’s supplementary sections (Media +, Network+ and Education+) are presented in a mini-site of their own. Each of them has its own design style and colour, but all are laid out in the same format. This adds to the feeling of good construction.
The Education+ section includes an A-Z of Universities which offers short histories and critiques of universities from around the country. Curiously, the list stops at ‘P’ and completely misses out ‘F’ and ‘J’. The Media+ does not contain the job vacancies which are normally found in the printed version; neither does Education+, although it does have details on some courses (seemingly unrelated to education).
Finally, the site provides links to a couple of good Independent spin-off sites – Independent Travel and Independent Books. These are both full websites in their own rights but link in and out easily with the main Indy page. All in all a good news and features website with a few minor flaws.
Reviewer: Scott Billings
Subscribers can access the New Media Database by selecting “New Media” from the drop-down box at the top of this page.