HutchNews' New website....

[lurker]

Prolly one of the best newspaper websites has dumped itself into the abyss.... and not without added problems to IE users:

Welcome to our new site

Welcome to the new look of hutchnews.com. We hope to provide an easy-to-navigate and more updated site with interactive features for our readers.

Currently, we are still working out some issues with the way the site displays in Internet Explorer. It is best when viewed in Mozilla Firefox, which can be downloaded for free at Mozilla - Home of the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client.

Thanks for reading and please look for these changes in the future.

Don't forget to wear your banner blinders.

Hutchinson News Online

RIP HutchNews.com....

[Tee]

While I do like the added feature of RSS news feeds, I am not thrilled with having all the ads. I mean..it's understood that advertisement money pays the bills, but I think you have to balance ads with content. Usually, the opening page of a website has the fewest ads...this site has 15 ads on the opening page, all intermingled with the real content. How many of us would be captivated to pickup a newspaper that had 15 ads on the front page?

I hope they are still in a state of flux.....I did notice some problems like the "Teen charged in K.C.-area stabbing death" story repeated FOUR TIMES, the weather is broken up into two separate places on the right column.

Also, the community calendar, get involved, and photo gallery should be on separate pages with links on the horizontal navigation bar, instead of jumbling them all up on the main page.

Too many people still have slow connections or dialup to have 55 different sections on your opening page. Many people will close the connection instead of waiting on it to load up. Plus, the opening page should be designed to captivate you and hold your interest, drawing you to the other pages of the site which then soak you with a moderate amount of advertising.

Looks like they have decided to farm out the website services to Mediaspan and Marketaide. I definitely think they have made some mistakes here. I would be screaming at the people who have taken over the site management.

[Tee]

I take back what I said about liking the RSS feature. I tried it and it does not work like other news sites. The RSS feed gives you EVERYTHING, without any way to specify a region, topic or news category. All other news sites offer such filtering capabilities. Hope they didn't pay much to move from ZWire to MediaSpan.

Also, Hucthnews is attempting to use frames to mask the real URL, making it appear like it's not a canned site. Well, it's not working like it's supposed to. Most of the links show the real URL. Some of them even link back to the old zwire site (example: click on "Classifieds").

Look at this page... Little wide?

[lurker]

Most site designers forget about weblife in the slow lane.

I'll give the News an F. Major suckage.







I'll give Tee an A for his critique.....

[OLDHAG]

I got upset when the Glob put an ad for Waters True Value right smack in the middle of an obit and I called them on it. They said that is what customer paid for. So I called Waters and they had not seen it yet and was not to happy when I told them where their ad was put. This was last year sometime. Any way I thought it was pretty rude to put an ad there.

[lurker]

Were they trying to rent their Backhoe?

[lurker]

I couldn't even get their site to load this am....

I hope they fired their webmaster, and that he took his site with him....


Oooops. mybad... it loaded but it's still bad.