Comments on: The 4 parts of an optimized online news site

By: Ellen Berkovitch

Ellen Berkovitch — Tue, 11 May 2010 07:48:26 +0000

As my webmaster has frequently liked to remind me, at http://adobeairstream.com we used our CMS for ease of navigation and various other reasons at startup, and then hot-wired it every which way to Sunday to include such things as interactive video modules. In short the design of an optimized website is an ongoing process.
Robert, great post, but I would like to add as a new media producer and journalist that discussing such things as optimizing pages using values of interactivity is partly also a function of recognizing that the search engines have ingrained biases. Entertainment, a gigantic category heading on Google, submits to smaller marginalized headings such as Arts and Humanities, or Literary, So part of what a media producer/journalist in our times is also doing, as you know, is attempting to encode a new consciousness in reader/consumers. Partially a function of trying to establish that a category called contemporary art Santa Fe might become optimiz-able only if you can first communicate through a sort of online osmosis that people need to search that way. Please please, more reporting on how to help indies leg up on those whose brands help ahead of time to solve the problem of name recognition. With advance name recognition, optimization is a function of using the good material you’ve got. Unfortunately all the good material in the world however is only a limited tool in organic searches. Would love to read more on this.

By: Toby Murdock

Toby Murdock — Wed, 05 May 2010 15:30:30 +0000

Great post Robert. I summarized and put my own spin on it on my blog. I wonder though about this statement: "you must always look beyond the capabilities of your current CMS, focusing instead on what you see as the information and communication needs of your audience. In doing that, you must look first toward how your target audience is getting and using information online, and then envision a publishing environment that builds on their current behavior to maximize participation on your site." It seems that you're advocating for media organizations to build sites beyond existing CMS solutions, presumably doing internal development. Do you really see this as feasible? With all of the challenges that media organizations are now dealing with, trying to develop an additional competency in software development seems like a tall order.

By: Mike Cloutier

Mike Cloutier — Wed, 05 May 2010 07:02:03 +0000

The idea of the knowledge base is very interesting. It takes advantage of the key thing that newspapers have that is scarce elsewhere — writers who are capable of synthesizing large amounts of information into concise articles.