Printed Matters

This is the first in a series of posts all this week taking a hard look at the websites of the major Toronto dailies. We’ll start off with the paper with Canada’s highest daily circulation, the Toronto Star.

The Toronto Star’s website is built on the relatively new publishing system TOPS 2.0 (Total Online Publishing System) by Toronto-based imason inc. and implemented by TorStar’s own TorStar Digital development group. Almost all TorStar-owned newspapers now use this system, including, with one notable exception, all the Metroland community papers. Because of that, most of what I have to say here applies to those papers as well.

The Good

1. RSS feeds – Since I switched to using Feedreader to gather and aggregate all my news and blogs, any site that didn’t have a feed probably won’t be looked at. Not by me, at least. Would I miss much? No, because as I sit and watch the news trickle in from the various sites I have in my feed, I see the same stories. The Star has excellent categorized RSS feeds which means I can subscribe to, say, the Ideas feed and not the Sports feed.
2. Contextual submenus – The main menu stays the same no matter where you go, but the secondary menu changes depending on which main section you’re in. Works for me.
3. Completeness – they’re not shy about putting everything you might expect in a paper edition onto the web. Comics, crosswords, horoscopes, lotteries, Sudoku: it’s all there, some of it webified very nicely.
4. Timestamps – every story is timestamped, like “46 minutes ago” and so on. That helps me stay oriented as to how fresh a story is. Not so important now that I use a feed reader, but I remember that when I didn’t I really counted on that feature.
5. Their new Parent Central portal – somebody’s been reading their N2 manual! A great niche service, and fairly well done too, I might add.

The Bad

1. Home Page – it’s a link fest. As I write this there are about 250 links on the Star’s home page. Holy crap, which one should I click? What do I want to do first? Aside from the SEO implications, which are significant, that’s a usability nightmare: “Your homepage should offer users a clear starting point for the main one to four tasks they’ll undertake when visiting your site.”
2. Invalid HTML – Failed validation, 255 Errors ‘Nuff said? No. I told the guys at TorStar Digital about this over two years ago, when they were trying to foist the system on ParrySound.com. Why, I must ask, would you bother using a nice, modern XHTML Doctype if you’re not going to follow it?
3. Pictures – although the pictures that accompany a story are of excellent quality and presented at a decent size (405px wide), there is never more than one per story, and you can’t click the pic or a link to get a bigger one. This is a TOPS limitation, I’m sure.

And yes, The Ugly

1. Piss-poor search – you can only search through the last two weeks of news. For the rest of it, you have to go to a completely different site and pay money. If that’s not ass-backwards, I don’t know what is. Aside from being deeply offensive to users (as in when I click on a link in Google only to find the page has been removed), it can’t be doing much for their business model. Do these guys even get the web? It makes me wonder. But not as much as my next point:
2. No comments – you can’t comment on stories. Did they hit a time warp or something? Is this not 2008? Yes, it is, and any other news site worth its salt, including the Globe and Mail and the CBC, lets you comment on stories. For example, let’s look at the top headline (as I write) on the Globe and Mail: Opposition leads in Zimbabwe vote. It was put up on the site at 1:46 p.m. today and six hours later has 23 comments, which help to contextualize the story for me. I know that TOPS has the capability to allow this, so it’s a management issue, not a technology issue – one that they should fix as soon as possible. (An aside: the TOPS comment implementation, which you can see on most Metroland papers running TOPS, is a frustrating and silly thing.)

These last two items are really ugly, ruining for me the excellent categorized RSS feeds and generally excellent quality of the Star’s content. Overall Mark: D-.

Tomorrow: The Globe and Mail’s site gets a lookin’ at.

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