29 Apr 08 Online feature: Las Vegas Sun, ‘Bomb Demonstration’

I’ve been incredibly impressed with the online presence of the Las Vegas Sun. There’s something about the site that just breathes and feels welcoming. One area where they are shining is their multimedia offerings. Like I mentioned in a post yesterday, they include a multimedia link as an integral part of their navigation.

There it is, right there at the top just screaming ‘Click Me!’

One of the pieces they ran recently was a video piece bomb testing and demonstration held by the Las Vegas Fire Department in the Nevada desert. What I liked most about this was that when you go to the video it is large and in your face with excellent quality. It’s big, loud and begs you to ‘Watch me!’ (Yes, I’ve managed to anthropomorphize Web pages, back off!)

Too often sites have their videos squashed into a tiny box along with the story. While many do offer a full-screen option, sometimes a near full-screen view as the default would better serve the piece. They way I see it, your organization paid the reporter or reporters to check out the story, film it and then paid your video team to edit and package the video. Why not play it up as much as you can? You’re paying these people for their hard work, show it off! The Las Vegas Sun is doing an excellent job of that.

The second thing I liked was that the Sun offers the video in a downloadable, MP4 format, in both iPod sizes and even in 720p HD. The effort may not see worth it now, but if people start downloading your site’s videos, sharing them and then word gets around that you offer these things on your site, the traffic will follow.

As an aside, I don’t know how much the complicated ownership structure the Sun has with the Las Vegas Review-Journal has to do with it (which I’m sure it does), but their site is refreshingly lite in ads. This may be a bad thing for them eventually in an increasingly revenue-centric model, but for now, it’s great.

I could go on and on about the Sun’s site, but I’ll let you decide. Check it out, they are a great example of design meeting journalism in a great way.

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Tags: multimedia, new media, online journalism

28 Apr 08 Where’s the multimedia tab?

In perusing several newspaper Web sites I noticed an oddity. Many sites, though I won’t mention any names, did not have a ‘multimedia/interactive/data” tab as part of their navigation. For most of them it was shoved halfway down the page, sometimes even several scrolls below the main content. This is a travesty at this stage in the game.

Even if your site doesn’t have much in the way of interactive online content, you should already be paving the way for that content in the future. Whether it be audio slideshows, video or even just picture galleries, readers should have a direct link along with all of the major sections or channels of your site to get there.

Putting it anywhere else on the site buries the content and takes the eyes away from one of the largest traffic pullers of any site. Multimedia content is an integral part of any news Web site and deserves equal billing next the news, sports, entertainment and business.

Oh, and horizontal navigation is the way to go. For more information as to why, check out Poynter’s ‘Eyetracking the News.’

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Tags: multimedia, online journalism, web design