Wednesday, May 30, 2007

A New Look .....

..... for KMID-TV's website. What do you think about it?

10 comments:

Eric Siegmund said...

Hmm. I wouldn't have known it was KMID's website if you hadn't told me. In fact, I wonder if it really is. The news stories are "powered by KMID-2" but otherwise there's no branding, which strikes me as very odd. Even the URL – permianbasin360 – seems out idiosyncratic.

I do like the relative cleanness of the site, though.

Eric Siegmund said...

And the odd inclusion of the word "out" in my comment is even more, well, idiosyncratic. ;-)

Jeff said...

Eric, I agree ..... of all TV station websites in the West texas market, this seems the least 'promotional' ..... which is not necessarily a bad thing, unless you have some consul-tic hammering on you to 'push the brand'

Eric Siegmund said...

You're probably going to find this odd, but I'm a bit uncomfortable with an "unbranded" news site. I like to know who's responsible for the site; it helps me assess the credibility of its content.

Jeff said...

Eric, I see your point. Perhaps a more conventional byline (instead of 'powered by' or whatever) or a little more information in the banner would help. This was something that came up, years ago, when mrt.com and kwes.com were merged into mywesttexas.com, which didn't have a strong push on branding, but DID make it clear in the banner who was responsible for the site.

Eric Siegmund said...

Yeah, I think those things would help. I recognize there are a lot of co-branding or "partnership solutions" out there for media websites, and while those alternatives probably make economic sense for the media outlet, they're not necessarily optimized for the consumer. I think the media outlet should be almost paranoid about presenting a credible image, and removing any doubts about whose words (or pictures) belong to whom.

It's one thing for KMID to simply provide the news content for someone else's aggregation site; it's quite another for this to actually be KMID's site. As it stands, I'm not sure which is the case.

Les said...

My first reaction to the site was negative. But after spending awhile there I kinda like it. I agree tho, that it sure doesn't identify KMID very prominently. We'll see how well they keep it up to date. And it sure would be nice to include a RSS feed.

Jeff said...

Les, you raise a couple of very good points. The popularity of RSS feeds has grown over the years. And keeping a site up-to-date is a day-by-day (hour-by-hour) challenge.

Anonymous said...

I share many of the above sentiments. On branding, a first glance at the items with the most significant position (top left) would indicate this was perhaps a site for the Midland County Public Library.

In my opinion the navigation, perhaps the single most important element, on the site is a little weak. The position and shape could be taken for a banner ad.

The overall design of the site kind of feels like there is a little too much "stuff" on every page.

I don't remember what the site looked like before, but I'm guessing it is probably an improvement.

Jeff said...

Justin, welcome to my blog! And thank you for submitting some very good points. I don't know if we have - or ever will - see a finished product for any of our local television station's websites ..... assuming there ever is, truly, such a thing as a finished website.