Holovaty.com

Post-Connections notes: Chron.com

Continuing yesterday's summary of my comments from the Connections conference, here are some thoughts on Chron.com, the Web site of the Houston Chronicle:

The left-rail navigation is alphabetical. Several usability studies have said such navigation lists are harder to use than normal (categorical) lists. (I've discussed this topic previously.)
It's great to see the clearly labeled last-updated time at the top of the home page. It'd be even more helpful (for non-U.S. readers) if the acronym "CST" were explained. There's no doubt people in Houston will know it means "Central Standard Time," but readers from other parts of the world -- visitors from Australia who stumble upon chron.com via a Google search, for instance -- might not. "CST" is a prime candidate for the <acronym> tag (as previously discussed); or, better yet, the word could be linked to a page explaining this particular time zone in depth, and providing a means for users to convert their own time zone to Houston's.
At the top left of the home page, I see three links: "ARCHIVES", "MAKE THIS YOUR" and "HOME PAGE". I pity the user who clicks that third line, thinking it's a link to the home page. These small annoyances pile up quickly.
On the lower right of the entertainment page, what's the difference between "Extras" and "Specials"? I'm sure the Chron.com producers know how they differ -- but, at face value on this Web page, they look to be the same thing. Some more descriptive keywords would help.
The home page's basic, one-field search box has a "Clear" button -- a practice often discouraged because it causes more trouble than it's worth. Particularly for a one-field form, a "clear" button is unnecessary.
On the home page, the labels "Today's top stories" and "Other news" are unnecessary; they communicate nothing that the visual design itself doesn't. And the former occupies precious screen real estate.

The Case of the Mysterious Date

I've touched on this phenomenon before, but it's worth discussing in depth. Simply put, a number of news/information sites display ambiguous dates on their story pages without designating (either visually or explicitly) whether they're publication dates or the current date. This practice is confusing, misleading -- and easily avoidable.

I've given this a little thought and have divided sites into four groups:

Group 1: Those that display only one date and make clear what that date means. (Good)
Group 2: Those that display only one date but do not make clear what it means. (Bad)
Group 3: Those that display two dates but make clear how they differ. (OK, but potentially confusing)
Group 4: Those that display two dates but do not make clear how they differ. (Horrible)

Let's take these one at a time.

Group 1

Many news sites keep it simple by displaying only a single date -- the date of story publication -- and placing it in the content area to give users a visual clue that the date is intrinsically related to the story. Good examples: arizonarepublic.com, which places the date just below a story's byline, and seattlepi.com, which places it slightly above a story's headline.

The key on these sites is the visual relationship between the date and the rest of the content. For example, there's no need to preface the date with "Date posted: " if the date appears just below the byline; in that case, it's obvious the date refers to the publication date.

Group 2

A problem arises when a news site displays a single date but doesn't identify it.

The New York Times' site offers a fine example. On its story pages (sample page), a date appears in the upper-right corner -- located far enough from the content that you might stop and think, "Is that today's date, or the date this article was published?"

In the Times' case, it's the date the article was published. But I only know that because I clicked around the site and observed the dates change. Because the date is so far removed from the content area (the light purple search bar stands between them), they're not visually tied, as the Group 1 examples were. The Times would do well to label this with "Posted:" or "Publication date:", whichever is more appropriate.

At the other end of the spectrum is irelandonsunday.com, which displays the exact current time -- yes, including seconds -- in the upper-right corner of its story pages. (This feature requires JavaScript.) Just like nytimes.com, the date is not labeled. How do we know what this date represents?

Group 3

Introducing a second date into the picture makes things more confusing, but some sites manage to pull it off with minimal confusion.

North Carolina's Sanford Herald displays today's date and the article's publication date, using placement to distinguish the two. (Note that there's still a chance a reader might mistake the former for the latter.)

The Hollywood Reporter gets a little sketchier, displaying the current date near the logo but prominently displaying the article's publication date below the headline to clear up confusion.

Likewise, benicianews.com displays the current date in the upper-right corner but displays the publication date just above the headline. And cjonline.com displays today's date in the upper-right corner while showing an article's last-modified date just below the headline.

Group 4

The most confusing way to present dates is to display two of them with no apparent distinction. You might particularly be inclined to double-take a story such as this one on nytimes.com, which displays one date ("PHOENIX, Nov. 27") in the article body and a second ("November 28, 2002") at top right. Which one's correct? Journalists will tell you that "PHOENIX, Nov. 27" is a newspaper convention called a "dateline" -- a short snippet giving the reporter's location, if not local, and the date -- but, convention or not, having two ambiguous dates on the same page is confusing.

Similarly, The Indian Express shows two different dates on story pages, as does heraldonline.com.

The solution

It's easy to make dates make sense: Identify them.

A label works well. The Belfast Telegraph uses the label "Publication Date:". Savannahmorningnews.com uses "Web posted". Greenvilleonline.com uses "Posted". On these sites, the meaning of dates is unambiguous -- which is the way it should be.

Giving the date is crucial in presenting the news; without a clear disclosure of the date, a news article is useless.

Thursday's recommended reading

Hypergene MediaBlog is a new blog "All about Participatory Journalism -- how audiences are changing the future of news and information." Great stuff, including something that looks familiar: Site reviews. I've added the site to my blogroll on Holovaty.com's home page, so you should be able to tell when the site is updated -- as long as they take the time to ping weblogs.com, which, I've observed, they only do on occasion. UPDATE, 1:15 p.m.: Chris from Hypergene e-mailed me to say the site will ping regularly.

The latest Hypergene MediaBlog entry reviews Google News and, among other things, suggests it should provide custom RSS feeds of search results. Google News in RSS does just that -- although, as Mark Pilgrim points out, the hacked service might not last long, considering Google's Terms of Service.

A recent E-Media Tidbits item, "Will New Quark Move Print Designers to the Web?", sparked some good discussion on WYSIWYG Web page editors and how useful -- or, in my opinion, terrible -- they are.

Dan Gillmor complains about an inept, unusable Web site.

The latest Small Initiatives newsletter lists "Things that make a good content search suite." I'm working on adding many of those features to my custom-built search engine, which (hopefully) will be released to the public.

A week from today I'll be in New York City for the Online News Association conference. I'll be on the Web databases panel, speaking about the Nursing Home Guide I put together a few months ago. If you plan on going, or if you live in New York and would like to say hello, drop me a line. I'm also looking for tips on what to do; this will be my first trip to NYC.

Site review: suntimes.com's 'online partners'

Suntimes.com, Web site of the Chicago Sun-Times, has links to "Visit our online partners:" at the bottom of almost every page sitewide. Here are the links, worded as they appear on the site:

What do these sites have in common? They're all properties of Hollinger International, a large media chain that owns the Sun-Times. It seems as if some executive at Hollinger decided to require suntimes.com to link to other papers in the chain, without considering whether those links would be of any value.

And indeed, many of these links are utterly useless. The Jerusalem Post? The UK's Daily Telegraph? There's nothing here to explain why a reader of the Chicago Sun-Times would ever want to click those.

I can see how the link to Suburban Chicago Newspapers is useful -- not only because that site's content is relevant to Sun-Times readers, but also because it includes the "Suburban Chicago" in the link text; that tells me what I should expect to see upon clicking the link.

The link to "Post-Tribune," on the other hand, means little to me. If it weren't grouped with the Jerusalem Post, maybe I'd guess (correctly) that it's another Chicago-area newspaper. But putting it next to the Post throws it all out of whack; it makes me skeptical of all those links.

I'd suggest they remove these links, because they're unnecessary, confusing and seemingly random. But if they insist on keeping them, here are two suggestions:

Clarify the phrase "Visit our online partners." Something like "Other Hollinger newspapers" would give users a better idea of what those links are. And maybe link the word "Hollinger" to the media chain's corporate site; "Hollinger" alone is meaningless to people who don't care about media ownership.
Clarify the link text. For example, instead of "Post-Tribune," say something like "Northwest Indiana news -- Post-Tribune." It's impractical to link to a news site without identifying which part of the world it covers.

Short thoughts on providencephoenix.com and brownsvilleherald.com

I've taken on an ultra-cool contracting job doing some programming and database design, so intensive site reviews will be a bit less frequent. That said, I'll continue to point out good and bad things about various news sites I come across. For instance:

The Providence Phoenix in Providence, Rhode Island, has a relatively clean, usable site. I love the clear navigation choices on the left. They don't try to invent wacky section titles such as "Periscope". But what's up with the "Read reviews from" section at the bottom of the music page? One glance at that solid mass o' numbers makes my eyes hurt. I doubt many people use it. (And same goes for the gray table with randomly assorted links at the bottom of many pages sitewide -- as in this example.)

The Herald in Brownsville, Texas, has some nice, big photos on its home page and story pages. But most of those images (for instance, this one) include the photographer's credit as part of the image, breaking one of the cardinal rules of Web design: Avoid Using Images To Display Plain Text. When I skimmed over the code, they appeared to have ALT text -- but after a closer look I found that each photo had an identical id="A customer walks by casa de cambio stores on International Blvd near the Gateway Bridge Monday afternoon in Brownsville."

(Hey, whaddya know, photos on the individual story pages all have that exact same "description," too.)

A simple mishap like this is permissible on non-professional sites, such as personal sites, but it's entirely unacceptable on a site that aims to maintain journalistic standards. An incorrect ALT attribute is a typo; in this case, giving every photo the same "...Monday afternoon in Brownsville" text is comparable to giving each photo in a print newspaper the same caption.