Printed Matters

This is the second in a series of posts all this week taking a hard look at the websites of the major Toronto dailies. Today we look at Canada’s Gray Lady, the Globe and Mail.

The Globe’s site is built on a Java-based platform that is, as far as I can tell, a home-rolled solution. According to some digging in the Internet Archives, they started using this platform sometime between April 1999 and August 2000.

The Good

1. Nice big pictures – when you click a thumbnail embedded in a story on the Globe’s site, you pop up a window with a nice big version of the pic, usually 500px wide, but often as large as 800px wide. The photographs are very well done.
2. Contextual Menus – as the Star does, they have a main menu that stays the same on each page, and a secondary menu that changes as you enter each section. Again, works for me.
3. RSS Feeds – again, like the Star, they have categorized RSS feeds so you can subscribe to Technology feeds but not, let’s say, Sports.
4. Article Tools – nice complete set of things you can do with each article: print it, share it on social media sites, email it, and, importantly, comment on it!
5. The Day in Pictures – Damn, I love that little multimedia widget they have in the right sidebar. the actual photo galleries aren’t as snazzy as the Flash-driven galleries at CBC (here’s an example for Earth Hour) but the pictures are great and it does the job.
6. Comments – Ah, lovely comments. Check this story about Bob Rae, which has 402 comments right now and climbing. The Globe is the ONLY Toronto daily that allows comments on almost every story they put on the site.
7. The Popularity Widget – It shows up on every page, and it has three tabs – Most Viewed, Most E-mailed, and Most Discussed, which tell me at a glance what people are interested in and thinking about.

The Bad

1. Crazy URLs - The Globe uses some crazy-long URLs, which don’t let users use the URL like a UI, and which interfere somewhat with the web’s social navigation. Check this one, picked randomly from the home page: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080401.wfrance0401/BNStory/International/home. 99 chars, folks, enough to cause display issues just about anywhere.
2. Home page Link-fest – like the Star, the Globe seems to think it has to show you every single thing you can do on the site on the home page. 375 links on that sucker today. Where do you start? Beats me – probably just the top headlines and the menu is all you really need.
3. Irritating Ads – I need to get my mouse up to the menu…to do that I need to cross over that Rogers ad…oh, no, it’s opened up and covered up the thing I was trying to click on. Jesus, it won’t go away! Ok, sorry, sorry, I won’t try that again.

The Ugly

1. Pay Wall – Only one thing in the Globe’s ugly category, but it’s a doozie: the god damned pay wall. No, I will not get a subscription so I can see Jeffery Simpson’s column. Since I don’t get the paper, I have no way to know whether I want to see Jeffery Simpson’s columns. So stop putting them in my RSS feeds, then saying “Nope, Globe Insiders Only” when I click on it.

The Globe and Mail fares pretty well. The annoying pay wall only affects certain columnists and other material that they deem too good for us Internet users. Overall mark: C.

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