61–70 of 189 posts
I used to like the local newspaper's terrible site. On the rare times I went to it looking for news, they would put up a div to blur out the article if you weren't a subscriber. It was easy to just open the inspector and delete the div to read the article. Now they update their site to actually not load the article unless you subscribe. Progress...
I actually did some freelance website development for a local newspaper website around 15 years ago. I can't speak for larger newspapers, this was my experience with a much smaller one. The biggest challenges I found were: 1. Lack of a real technical / engineering department. Having said that, their core business is news and they really just need a functioning website, not a full (and expensive) engineering departmen…
Good points. I'd expand that by saying that these apply to any organization that wants a content-based site but has no need for a real web development team. Non-technical users often don't know what they want until they see something on the screen, and once they see it on the screen, they inevitably want to make changes that undo the first set of things they asked for. Everybody seems to have an opinion about layouts…
That is doing the wrong thing. These non-technical people don't need to understand "limits". They need someone with a clear process who guides them through it. Unfortunately many web devs have no process.
Print design has its own limitations but the process which people have to follow is more established.
I worked for a media conglomerate for several years on several high volume media sites. The GMs and POs that I came across often had a great sense for what made user experiences great, but those would take a back seat every single time for revenue opportunities. A company wants to do an ad takeover for the sites and slather sidebars/banners/popups everywhere, Ad Ops wants to sell a new module in the right rail, Outbr…
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... which co. Is the not Google one?
Goldman Sachs?
What they should have done is only making the web site accessible for subscribers or people with a day-pass from buying a paper. The transition from paper to digital would then be more or less seamless for the consumer as they would have both for a while.
Making people realize they don't need the news papers was their mistake.
Why are newspapers so horrible? My family used to get a paper newspaper when I was growing up in the 70's and 80's. It had all the regular stuff - news, local news, editorial, sports, etc. But mostly it was ads. On Sunday it was a monstrosity, being nearly unmanageable due to the number of ad inserts. Most of it you threw away without looking at. Most of the stories had no value. One day later I couldn't remember wha…
I actually did some freelance website development for a local newspaper website around 15 years ago. I can't speak for larger newspapers, this was my experience with a much smaller one. The biggest challenges I found were: 1. Lack of a real technical / engineering department. Having said that, their core business is news and they really just need a functioning website, not a full (and expensive) engineering departmen…
> 1. Lack of a real technical / engineering department. Having said that, their core business is news and they really just need a functioning website, not a full (and expensive) engineering department. I agree with the rest of your points but this one doesn't really make sense. My guess is it would take fewer engineers to make these websites better. The horrible parts of newspaper websites are the pop-ups and broken…
Which also relates to items 3 and 4... without strong technical leadership, a developer team can easily just settle into triage/service mode, where they just try to keep up with satisfying each request that comes in. The result is growing technical debt and an unfocused, confused product.
I actually did some freelance website development for a local newspaper website around 15 years ago. I can't speak for larger newspapers, this was my experience with a much smaller one. The biggest challenges I found were: 1. Lack of a real technical / engineering department. Having said that, their core business is news and they really just need a functioning website, not a full (and expensive) engineering departmen…
Good points. I'd expand that by saying that these apply to any organization that wants a content-based site but has no need for a real web development team. Non-technical users often don't know what they want until they see something on the screen, and once they see it on the screen, they inevitably want to make changes that undo the first set of things they asked for. Everybody seems to have an opinion about layouts…
What does that have to do with technical or non-technical? Isn't that just visual vs non-visual? Print designers complain about the same thing.
Personally, as someone who is technical but not visual, I know I definitely don't know what I want when putting together anything visual until I build it, because I can't form a clear enough picture in my mind of what the end product will look like. So I inevitably end up building something, being really really miserable about it, and then tweaking it until I'm only moderately sad about it.
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AMP is the only reasonable alternative I've seen How about making the site fast and usable in the first place?
Here is why: AMP is much cheaper and simpler to set up, it is way more optimized for mobile usage than trimming down your website, it brings better placement in search results and it is backed by the leading search engine itself, thus ensuring your team is not wasting resources trying to guess how Google works and how to exploit it.
This is the only reason anyone bothers with AMP.
And the reason Google does that--and the only reason Google pushes AMP at all--is so that they can become an intermediary between the publisher and their customers. If you're concerned about walled gardens, and you think AMP is the solution, I'd suggest you're not thinking clearly about what AMP actually is.
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> They wanted the website to "feel" more like a real newspaper, including things like incorporating custom layout, design and other elements on the website. Explaining the limitations of HTML, CSS and Javascript was a bit ... frustrating for both sides. Did they demand "page turning animation" each time user clicks "next page" in the pagination?
I think 15 years ago the main misunderstanding would be that web pages have to able to flow around the dimensions of the window that the user has chosen. You can't fix things in particular places as newspaper people would be used to. I imagine today people are more familiar with that concept.
You... would be surprised. I've been asked to implement "pixel perfect" designs on mid-six figure projects, and explaining that that isn't how the web works can be fruitless when their background is in traditional media.
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That cannot possibly be true, as AMP is literally a subset of HTML.
We just had a thread the other day about how AMP is an anachronistic, proprietary platform that breaks functionality that is otherwise completely fine for nearly all devices.