Apr 05 2008
Critical Website Reviews – Part 5: Summary
This is the last in a series of posts all this week taking a hard look at the websites of the four major Toronto dailies. Now we summarize.
Here’s a menu of the posts covering each individual paper:
None of the sites of the four major Toronto dailies are excellent, for various reasons. The Globe fares the best because it’s the only one that allows comments, but it doesn’t get an A because of its egregious pay wall, and the front page link bombardment.
It might be useful to summarize things in a chart:
| Characteristic | The Star | The Globe | The Post | The Sun |
| Platform | 3rd party/ ASP | Proprietary/ Java | Proprietary?/ ASP | Proprietary/ ColdFusion |
| Contextual Menus | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| RSS Feeds | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Comments | Limited | Yes | No | No |
| # links on front | 251 | 379 | 382 | 120 |
| # validation errors on front | 250 | 49 | 299 | 163 |
| DocType | XHTML 1.0 Transitional | HTML 4.01 Transitional | XHTML 1.0 Transitional | None |
| Pay Wall | Yes (archives) | Yes (some columns) | No | No |
| Blogs | Yes (3rd party site) | Yes | Yes | No |
| Overall Grade | D- | C | D | F |
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[...] is new. On major news sites, they’ll put links to the latest stories from today or yesterday (100s of them sometimes). The Star makes sure you know how fresh their breaking news is by putting a timestamp on the story [...]