Monday, April 25, 2005

Improving article pages

Steve Outing at Editor & Publisher writes about improving online news article pages:
    More and more people bypass news Web sites' home and section pages .... The best approach is to create an article-page template that serves as a sort of secondary home page ... Give them enough choices to guide them to other important content elsewhere on the site.

    According to its Web site's editor, Angus Frame, 41% of globeandmail.com visits now begin on non-hub pages ... "Readers who went straight to a story page had no idea how much was available on globeandmail.com," [Frame said]. "They only saw one story and then had no reason to stick around."

    Globeandmail.com's managers decided last year to "improve the story-page experience." [Frame said], "We added valuable, informative links to the right-hand side of the story in a fairly wide column. We turned every story into a mini hub .... Literally overnight daily page views increased by more than 25%, from about 2.3 million page views a day to 3.0 million page views a day."
See also my earlier post, "Targeting and online newspapers".

[via Simon Waldman]

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