After spending a little over a hundred dollars he left, according to a news report by Bloomberg news agency. 

Bernard Madoff may not come back in a hurry.

Last Thursday, two FBI agents arrested Mr Madoff at his $5 million apartment on New York’s Upper East Side.

The 70-year-old faces up to 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $5 million. What he is being investigated for could be the biggest fraud in corporate history.

 He is alleged to have run a Ponzi scheme - that may have cheated investors around the world out of $50 billion.

Over the years

The Telegraph reports that Madoff was born to a New York Jewish family in 1938.

The newspaper says that at the age of 22 he put the $5,000 proceeds of his summer jobs into launching his first business – an investment firm.

A decade later, Madoff had an impressive list of clients. He continued to do business and flourish.

The Times reports that by the early 1980s, the firm was one of the largest independent trading operations in the securities industry, and by 2000 it had about $300 million in assets.

The man with an impeccable reputation had even served as the chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Rich and famous and untrue

 In Charles Dicken’s Little Dorrit, Mr Merdle is a fictional banker who is a pillar of the community.  When his bank collapses, the lives of hundreds of investors are ruined.

Madoff, like Merdle, was a pillar of the community.  The Times newspaper reports that Mr Madoff had homes in Manhattan, the upmarket New York summer haunt of the Hamptons and Palm Beach, Florida.

Mr Madoff and his wife, Ruth, were noted for their philanthropy. Through the Madoff Family Foundation, they supported theatres, colleges and arts foundations; they also made significant donations to Jewish charitable organisations.

In the days following Mr Madoff’s arrest, the assets of the family’s foundation were frozen.

How did he do it?

The Guardian newspaper analysed how he did it. It is claimed Madoff was running a classic pyramid scheme. It relied on new money coming in to pay returns to existing investors.

The alleged scam appears to have been running for years, recording consistent returns of 10-12% a year even in a falling market.

The scheme fails if new money coming into the system dries up.

If he was falsifying his financial statements and markets are booming, few questions are asked.

The BBC has reported that it is not clear whether he squandered the money or  stashed it or simply lost it on the markets.

In the words of hedge fund boss Douglas Kass, of Seabreeze Partners Management: “It appears that at least $15bn of wealth, much of which was concentrated in southern Florida and New York City, has gone to money heaven.”

Leaving behind people who will never rest in peace. 

To visit the personal blog of the author please click here.

According to website U.S. Pharmacist, numerous studies have been conducted on the misuse of alcohol and they show that a popular public opinion is that alcohol is not a drug. 

To the contrary drug abuse specialist Dr. Sidney Cohen claims that alcohol is “the most dangerous drug in the world.”

Dr. Cohen lists these as the top negative health effects of alcohol abuse:

• Electrolyte depletion and water loss
• Thiamine and vitamin deficiency
• Pancreatitis
• Malnutrition
• and of course Liver damage

People seem to focus on the health benefits of alcohol, while the adverse effects are entirely greater. For the added life expectancy and the reduced risk of heart failure for the moderate user of alcohol, there are over 100,000 deaths in the U.S. alone related to alcohol.

In developed countries where alcohol is relatively cheaper, a culture of binge drinking and heavy alcohol use has emerged with public services and by extension the taxpayer feeling the brunt of the burden. Provisions for alcohol treatment and public health facilities that deal with alcohol related incidents such as car crashes, and other health issues mentioned above, come from the taxpayer. 

Drunk drivers are a public problem that is a side effect of alcohol abuse but it’s not just the cost of this to consider. Loss of lives from car crashes with drunk drivers to blame is a serious issue.

The main point of contention is whether or not a person can drink moderately. For the person who can, they may enjoy the benefits of this, but for the abusive personality, alcohol should be avoided in general because alcohol, though perceived as harmless, can have severe effects on the body and mind.

Click me to read measures taken against binge drinking.

Zeenews.com is the web portal owned and managed by India-based media major Essel group. The company owns a host of channels one of which is also a news channel. The news channel is in Hindi, but the website is for an English speaking audience.

First Impressions

The upper half of the website has been designed well. There is a large enough channel logo and a small enough advertisement on the masthead.

The use of soft colours such as blue and white with black lettering make for comfortable reading. 

The idea of replacing the tag line with the two editions – a domestic and international one – is ambitious. However, the international edition is a disappointment. The website can avoid displaying its weakness so boldly.

The main story with a picture is placed on the extreme left. However, there are three different copies of the same story below the picture. This confuses the reader. It would have been a much better idea to have one comprehensive copy.

The chaos in design becomes apparent when the user scrolls lower. Three advertisements line the perimeter of the first screen. This is distracting. It also creates a visual bumper – a sort of logical break.

The lower half is overwhelming. The very same navigation bar that appeared in the first half is rehashed with low resolution icons.

 “Top Stories” appear in the “middle/ bottom half”. Top stories must always logically be on the the “top” of the page. 
 

Then, as you browse lower, the website becomes a navigation minefield. “Top stories” are categorised.

And then, the website completely loses the plot by cramming a complaints section, investor information, entertainment news, cricket news, picture of the day,weather and market information all in one screen.

It becomes more cluttered and difficult to read as one navigates to the lower half.

A major drawback about this site is that the time stamp is missing. This confirms the suspicion that news is not regularly updated on this news site.  

Second impression

Use of website real estate in the first half is judicious. As the pie diagram indicates white space has been used very well. That helps to create a positive impression.

 

At first glance: The approximate use of website real estate

 

 

But this is squandered away as the user scrolls lower.

 

 

Navigation

 

Navigation on the website is repetitive. There is too much emphasis on categorisation of news which makes the site very complicated to navigate.

 

Some other unnecessary repetitions in navigation are: The career section which appears on the top navigation bar and on the bottom, A sub navigation bar under the main one called “Full coverage” and another one below the top stories called “Special” with similar stories.

 

The stories with special coverage follow a completely different design as compared with the main website. It is almost as if the user has navigated to a different website.

An integrated navigation bar would have been a much better.

Content

The lack of freshness in content is striking. “My 17 hours at the Taj” is a story about a survivor of the terror attack in Mumbai. This is the third story in the exclusive section. The terror attacks were carried on November 26. (The page was being viewed on 15 December 2008).

The top story is the same one that appeared in newspapers of the day. No NEWS website can afford to be so lackadaisical about this.  

The section on blogs has good write ups.The number of comments suggest that it does attract a healthy share of visitors. However, just four blogs have been written by different authors in the past month. The site must concentrate on its strengths – blogs seem to be one of them.

Writing

Half the alphabets of a word are coloured in grey and the other in blue. This is uncalled for and makes the site look less professional.

Headlines are written in print style. The stories are too long. A story that this user clicked on about the cash for questions scandal was about 3000 words. The sentences are long and they don not follow Jacob Neilson’s style of writing for the web.

Some pieces throw up really shabby writing: “Who says terror has no face? Terror has a face in all those humans who are alive to tell a tale of the brutal acts inflicted upon them.” Is the opening line for one the exclusive stories.

Comparison with the best in the business…

 …and what can zeenews.com do for a makeover? Well, for starters, like the BBC’s homepage the key word is: SIMPLIFY. The navigation is too jumbled and the designers try to hard to make this a comprehensive website.

The BBC is the best example of how a news website can have hundreds of stories yet be well organised.

Also, the articles should be shorter. The New York Times  also posts lengthy articles, but the writers are discerning. News articles are usually shorter and feature stories are long.

In conclusion, zeenews.com is not a bad website. And that’s why I think it definitely can be better.

 

 

References: Hompage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed (Jakob Nielson and Marie Tahir)

 

The Guardian (Nigeria) website

First impression:

The designer and the editor do not understand what good web designing entails. My reasons for this were:

• The front page of the site has a very unusual and untidy format.
  1. There is no space between the nameplate, the navigation menu bar (which runs across) and the main headline.
  2. The main headline as well as the story, which follows, runs horizontally across the page, while others are in a column.

• The nameplate ‘Guardian’ is not strong enough compared to the guardian.co.uk nameplate. The UK guardian’s nameplate is bold and sophisticated, however the Nigerian guardian’s nameplate looks ‘pixelated’ and too simple.
• There are a lot of distracting graphics coming from the randomly placed advertisement on the front page.
• The page is not very readable because:
  1. The typography  is very small and this can put off a reader.
  2. The page looks very cluttered and disorganised.

• The colour scheme does not serve any purpose. In fact it ends up confusing the reader when it comes to navigation.

Writing:

• The sentences are very long, i.e. 40 words in the first paragraph of this story. Click to view news story
• Interestingly enough, the UK guardian (click to view the page) also has lengthy sentences. In this case, the BBC has the right idea.
• The language used is not language necessarily for the average user. A lot of the words used are big and unnecessarily complex, which may slow down the average reader.
• The issue of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR) blaming the information management by the government is important and should have been further up in the story.
• The author has not taken into consideration, the F-shaped pattern. Ideally, the comment on the NIPR should have been the information that the reader’s second horizontal movement would scan over.
• The ‘By-lines’ are very inconsistent, and this shows a lack of attention to detail.
• The site has no outbound hypertext links. According to Jakob Nielsen, credibility can be increased through the use of these links. It shows that the author has done their homework and is not afraid to have readers look at other sites.
• On a good note, the news story on the site was successful when it came to keeping ‘one idea’ per paragraph.

Content and Presentation:

The guardian (Nigeria) website

The characteristics of web 2.0 sites are not prevalent in this news site. Furthermore, because reading from the screen takes longer, according to Nielsen’s findings, 79% of users scan any new page instead of reading it word for word. Therefore, for any news site, content and presentation are vital. This site fails to understand this.

• The stories have no links. This is a disadvantage because with links, the reader is able to have access to related stories that could provide them with background information or even an analysis of the issue discussed in the story.
• A photograph is an element that can, not only enhance easy scanning, but also be a point of interest. However, the only photograph on the site is of bad quality and is placed quite oddly on the page. Also, only after reading its caption, I found that it belonged to the main story. This layout does not work.
• The stories themselves have no subheadings, and this may intimidate the reader while making the text hard to scan.
• This site lacks any form of multimedia. There is one photograph that is of very bad quality. There are no videos, making the site quite jaded. Even the quality of the ‘distracting’ advertisements is very poor.
• The use of colour in the website is disastrous and unprofessional. It is obvious they are trying to use the gradient blue as the colour to identify the site with. However, although the colour has been incorporated in some parts of their navigation, they could have used it more. For example, the side bar to the right, the background colour should have been faded blue rather than the faded brown. Also they could have used the red, rather than the black for the colour of the news sub navigation (Africa, World etc).

Navigation:

What is website navigation? “Web site navigation is the science and skill which you apply to a web site that helps visitors move from one page to another.”

Firstly I want to commend the site for having some navigation in the first place. However, it is not enough to have navigation. The site has failed to make the navigation user-friendly. My reasons are:

• The navigation, on the home page, is very redundant.
• The navigation is confused. Some of the categories on the red coloured navigation, for example, Sports, business etc, could have been placed with the bold black text navigation links (Africa, World, Arts).
• Also the categories can be managed better. For example, why is ‘Africa’ and ‘World’ placed with ‘policy and politic’ and ‘Arts’?

In the UK guardian navigation is organised because regions are divided up as sub navigation under the ‘News’ main navigation link. Topics such as sports, business, travel, are among the main navigation menu.

After taking a good look at the UK guardian it has become apparent that the Nigerian guardian intended for what looks like red coloured navigation menu bars, to actually to be ‘extended sections’ of the topics on the blue main navigation menu bar.

Red highlighted section: Nigerian Guardian

But they were not as successful at it. In the UK guardian, the extended sections are bigger, they each have different colours for each section, e.g. Sports is green, comment is red and culture is pink. The Nigerian guardian’s extended sections look like menu bars rather. This is a clear example of the confusion going on, on the site.

Horror  films go  back  to  the  first  decades  cinema  was  created.
Their  main  goal  is  to  cause  fright  and  excitement  to  the  viewer  through  suspense.
And  while  they  often  seems  superficial  and  devoid  of  a  deeper  meaning, most  of  the  times  when  examined  from  a  critical  angle, they  usually  feature  concealed  concepts.

Their  commonest  themes  are  the  deepest  fears  of  the  individual, the  loss  of  identity, the  fear  of  the  unknown, the  inability  to  manage  the  sexual  instincts  etc.

The  first  ever  horror  movie  was  made  in  1896  by  French  filmmaker  George  Melies. It  was  called  “The  Devil’s  Castle”  and  was  only  two  minutes  long.

Killing  in  the  Name  of
There  are  many  movies  with  similar  concept  to  Craven’s  “A Nightmare  on  Elm  Street” featuring  notorious  cult  classic  serial  killers.

In  John  Carpenter’s  “Halloween”  that  was  released  in  1978, the  villain  is  Michael  Myers, who  murdered  his  sister  at  a  very  young  age  and  after  spending  many  years  in  a  psychiatric  hospital, he  escapes  and  slaughters   several  teenagers.

It  is  significant  to  point  out  that  Myers’  victims  are  sexually  promiscuous, a  fact  that  enforces  the  idea  that  the  film’s  bloodbath  is  a  revenge  of  the  conservative  1970s  America  that  frowns  upon  sexual  freedom.

It  is  a  fact  that  this  is  a  common  theme  in  most  American  teenager  horror  movies. Sexually  promiscuous  characters  are  the  first  to  be  put under  the  blade  of  the  killer.

In  Tobe  Hooper’s  “The  Texas  Chainsaw  Massacre”, Leatherface is  a  mentally  disturbed  serial  killer  and  a  cannibal  that  wears  a  mask  made  of  human  flesh, hence  his  nickname.

This  character  is  loosely  based  on  real  life  serial  killer  Ed  Gein, who  used  to  wear  the  skin  of  his  victims.

Sean  S.  Cunningham’s  “Friday  the  13th”  (1980) was  inspired  by  “Halloween”  and  introduced  the  second  most  notorious  killer  in  the  history  of  American  horror: Jason  Voorhess.

Despite  the  fact  that  Jason  did  not  appear  in  the  first  film  of  the  series, he  has  become  a  favourite  cult  classic  figure. In  fact, his  trademark  hockey  mask  is  most  famous  than  Krueger’s  metal  claw  glove.

Many  interpretations  of  Jason’s  motives  have  been  attempted, while  the  most  popular  one  is  putting  psychology  in  the  foreground,  suggesting  that  Jason  is  obsessed  with  his  mother  and  as  a  result  he  is  killing  everyone  to  please  her.

Finally,  more  lately (once  again) Wes  Craven’s  “Scream”  that  was  released  in  1996, is  differentiated  from  the  other  movies  by  being  a  parody  of  itself.

The  killers  are  two  boys  that  are  huge  fans  of  horror  movies  and  want  to  re-enact  them.

In  this  film  there  are  many  references  to  the  above  classic  films. It  seems  that  this  is  an  attempt  to  summarize  all  classic  horror  movies  through  the  ‘90s  angle.

So  what’s  your  favourite  scary  movie…?

The  night  terror  is  about  to  begin…
Producers  Brad  Fuller  and  Andrew  Form  have  recently  announced  at  shocktillyoudrop.com that  the  long  awaited  remake  of  the  cult  1984  film  “A  Nightmare  on  Elm  Street”  will be  their  next  movie.

Shooting  will  take  place  in  Chicago  this  spring  and  the  producers  are  currently  searching  for  a  new  actor  to  play  the  notorious  Freddy  Krueger.

Robert  Englund, the  actor  who  incarnated  the  undead  serial  killer  in  the  original  films, will  probably  take  part  in  the  movie  but  not  in  the  lead  role  since  the  producers  prefer  to  have  a  new  person  to  portray  the  terrifying  killer.

So  lock  your  doors  and  don’t  fall  asleep  because  Freddy  will  soon  be  unleashed  to  haunt  your  dreams.
1-2 Freddy’s Coming for You
The  original  “A  Nightmare  on  Elm Street”  movie  was  written  and  directed  by  Wes  Craven and  released  in  1984.

It  has  instantly  become  a  cult  classic  and  it  was  followed  by  seven  sequels.

The  story  introduces  the  character  of  Freddy  Krueger, an  undead  serial  killer  who  invades  people’s  dreams  and  kills  them  in  their  sleep.

Freddy’s  trademarks  are  his  burnt  and  severely  deformed  face, as  well  as  his  red  and  green  stripped  sweater, hat  and  metal  claw  leather  glove.

The  legend  says  that  Krueger  was  a  child  killer  during  his  life  time  that  was  eventually  burnt  alive  by  his  victims’  parents. However, before  he  died  he  was  approached  by  three  demons  who  were  searching  for  the  most  evil  soul  in  the  world  and  offered  him  the  power  to  turn  dreams  into  reality.

Freddy  Krueger  is  placed  among  the  most  famous  villains  of  worldwide  cinema  and  his  films  have  attracted  a  large  number  of  followers.

The  Killing  Fields
Wes  Craven  was  inspired  to  create  Krueger’s  character  after  reading  many  articles  in  the  L.A. Times which  reported  that  a  group  of  Cambodian  refugees  after  escaping  from  the  Pol  Pot’s  Khmer  Rouge regime  and  coming  to  America  suffered  from  nightmares.

In   fact, the  children  of  the  refugees  used  to  even  die  in  their  sleep.

Blank Generation
It  is  often  argued  that Freddy  Krueger  is  the  incarnation  of  the  American  unconscious.

He  is  the  embodiment  of  their  deepest  fears  that  torment  the  teenagers  that  want  to  take  control  of  their  lives  and  cope  with  the  demands  of  society.

After  all, America  loves  to  comment  on  its  problems  based  on  allegories  and  much  often  horror  films.

Click here for the background

Past performance does matter and that is what Unesco is giving as an explanation for not granting heritage site status to UK anymore.

Westminster Abbey. Photo by: Baya Agarwal

As a result Unesco told UK to first guard the existing sites well, reports BBC.

The warning issued by UNESCO in July, triggered a review that could lead the agency to label the sites as endangered.

The warning also states that if sufficient action is not taken, the sites could be removed from the World Heritage List.

Unesco concerns

The warning concerns iconic sites like Tower of London, which could be overshadowed by construction of the 1,017-foot skyscraper, scheduled for completion in 2012.

The UN’s cultural organisation fears the 900-year-old Tower has become overshadowed by skyscrapers which are threatening its historical value.

Also demolition of certain buildings in Edinburgh to pave way for modern architecture, pose threat to the city’s medieval Old Town.

The failure of Government to re-route Stonehenge is another example. New and upcoming projects in Bath, are also seen as a potential threat to the city’s historic character.

No proper vigil

According to BBC report, Unesco’s World Heritage Committee said that London’s planning policies to protect the tower were not applied effectively.

The report mentioned that the new developments appear not to respect the tower’s location.

The city is revising its policies in consultation with UNESCO, although it won’t revisit existing construction permits.

Site as well as surroundings

Maintenance of heritage status is governed by various factors and surroundings is one of them.

In an interview to BBC, Kishore Rao, World heritage committee member highlighted that, ‘One does not have to only maintain the authenticity of the site – that means that the structure itself is not damaged or modified – but also that it is presented in its historical context.’

Once the surroundings are lost, it is tough to appreciate the structure.

The recent project approvals in UK have prompted Unesco to dispatch inspectors to London, Edinburgh, and Bath, in addition to requesting status reports on all seven sites from UK authorities.

The long wait for Shakespeare’s Stratford and Margate to be declared as World heritage site may never come to an end.

According to The Sunday Times, Unesco stricter guidelines will now concentrate more on the developing countries. Unesco feels that with 24 existing heritage sites UK has had its fair share.

Unesco now instead wants to concentrate on the developing world and promote habitats such as deserts, jungles, Arctic Tundra etc.

Where on one had the travel agents promote UK as treasure of world heritage to their potential clients, Government feels the tourists are not affected by site status.

And so the decision to go strict with UK will not affect the country’s tourism sector at all.

Stonehenge. Photo by: Danny Sullivan

Past failures

Critics are claiming that the change was prompted in part by Unesco’s attacks on Britain’s record on safeguarding some of its sites.

Earlier in 2008 UN had issued warning that the Tower of London and Westminster might have to be classified as ‘in danger’ because of construction of skyscrapers nearby.

Also the failure to re-route a road that passes through Stonehenge had raised issues in the past.

The obtrusive modern architecture on Liverpool’s historic waterfront was also severely criticized by Unesco.

Site maintenance

According to the Sunday Times report, It costs up to four lac pounds to apple for status and an average of one lac fifty thousand pounds a year per site to maintain it.

The government’s decision to stop nominations to UN list of important historic sites in the world is a result of Unesco’s belief that Britain has its fair share.

Though UK does not have the highest number of heritage sites yet is the first country to have stopped nominations to the heritage list.

Italy tops the chart with 43 and UK ranks seventh in the list.

Disappointment

Despite Government’s assurance that the policy will not affect UK, the decision has left any heart-broken.

Supporters of a new series of the sites awaiting heritage status are feeling the pinch.

The official list of aspiring sites consisted of Shakespeare’s Stratford, Mohamed Al Fayed’s Fulham Football Club’s historic home, Resort Blackpool, the Stockton and Darlington railway and many others.

Blackpool council was quoted in Sunday Times saying that it had put the resort forward with its three piers, Tower ballroom, Winter Gardens and Victorian guest houses.

Click here for background.

Photo courtesy: Danny Sullivan (licensed under Creative Commons)

Caribbean Beat is the in-flight magazine for Caribbean Airlines, formerly known as BWIA (British West Indian Airlines), but it is also the most distributed magazine in the Caribbean and probably the most popular magazine that is made in the region.

Although the magazine is mostly made up of feature articles, it does contain news of of just about any major event in the Caribbean related to the arts.

First Impression

Caribbean Beat home page

Being a fan of the magazine I was rather disappointed to see its website.

• The magazine is filled with beautiful pictures and articles. The website is filled with white space.

• The headings are all in the colour of the magazine, purple, red and blue, which I don’t mind, but one male classmate insisted that the predominance of purple made the page look feminine, as if it were a woman’s magazine, which it isn’t. 

• The font is rather small, but it is Verdana.

• It is unclear which article is the main one.

• There is advertising on the top of the page below the top navigation and also to the right of the page, but it doesn’t distract me from the content.

• The banner is quite small and I think it should be enlarged.

• For a magazine website the pictures are too small.

Navigation

Is the main navigation at the side or the top?

The navigation is inconsistent. There is navigation on the left of the page and navigation at the drop, that is not drop down. I cannot tell which is meant to be the main navigation.

When you click on a link to one of the articles, it opens a new window. Nothing aggravates me more than having numerous open windows when I am online, especially within just one site.

The sub heads: Beat Blog, Features, Departments etc. although they look like clickable links, are not.

These sub-headings could also be sub-navigation

Content

On the top page there is a link to a blog, which of course opens in a separate window, but when it does open you realise that it only contains entries made by magazine staffers and that none of the entries have public comments.

      

The blog is the same as the update on the front page

I have been considering being the first to christen this blog with a comment.

There is no video on the site as well as no Flash and this is sad. This magazine provides a wealth of historical and cultural information that typical tourist publications would not have access to. I think video archives of the work this magazine does would be invaluable.

There are links to Facebook and MySpace pages though, and fans, members and friends of the group can have their say and interact in this way.

Writing

Picture too small; Text column too wide

Magazine means lovely, luscious pictures to me, but the pictures that are used in these articles are entirely too small.

Compared to Webby winning National Geographic (although I will admit they are some tough shoes to fill) Caribbean Beat falls short.

The pictures in  National Geographic stretch across the width of the text, while those in Caribbean Beat, though beautiful and relevant, are wrapped into the text and take up less than a third of the column width.

It’s obvious why National Geographic won a Webby for best use of photography, not only are the pictures amazing, but they really use them to add value to the articles. Caribbean Beat needs to use their photos in a more meaningful way.

The column of text in Caribbean Beat is too wide, spanning around 25 words in width. Ideal width would be around eight to ten words.

While the paragraphs for the most part follow the maximum of two sentences, they do go over at times, but I still think that in terms of paragraph spacing the text is scannable.

However, as with the home page, the font size is too small.

The page follows the rule of thirds to an extent, because at the top of the article there is a picture of the front of the magazine, the centre is the text and the right side houses ads.

As you scroll throughout the article however, there is nothing on the right side of the page. I think some sub-navigation would go well here, so that users wishing to read something else would not have to then scroll to the top of the page to do so.

Ways to Improve

• To follow the F plan discovered by Jakob Nielsen, the magazine will need to restructure their article by cutting down on their column width, blowing their pictures up and placing the most important text at the top of the article.

• To improve on the blog, staffers’ posts should not be in there. The very same articles that are posted by staffers are at some point or another placed at the top of the page when the topic is new, so what may serve them better is to archive these posts somewhere else, but not as blogs.

• To bone up on how many hits the site receives they should have outbound links within the articles.

Front page of ndtv.com

www.ndtv.com is a news website in India. The news channel New Delhi Television or NDTV is one of the major news television in India.

First impression

At a very first glance the masthead is not very prominent. It is too small and hardly noticeable. And the advertisement right next to the masthead rather shifts one’s attention from the masthead to the advertisement.

The colours are awfully dull. There is a combination of maroon, blue and grey. Maroon is a hard, grim and serious colour. And grey is very dull. On one hand it could suggest the nature of the website, which in this case is serious, hard core news. But it could also bore the reader because the reader is already engrossed in serious news and he or she would like to stay engaged.

Comparitively, The Guardian is also a serious news website. But it is much easy to the eye. There is not much use of colour, a bit of red and more of white but the way they have used these colours is very appealing to the eye. It is much easier to read as well.

Secondly, the use of nice, soft graphics on the homepage is totally non existent in ndtv.com. The font size of the texts is very small. Hence, it is not easily readable. It is too cluttered, has little white space. It is a non stop attack of text. There is little use of images.

The positives could be the presence of multimedia that includes videos and photo gallery. Others include hard news, quick updates and content.

Content

As far as content is concerned, it is for those who are looking for in depth coverage. The site provides information on India’s politics, business, sports as well as entertainment. There is also news from around the world.

They have a variety as far as news is concerned. For instance on Mumbai 26/11, there is a separate page where there are different links which takes to different stories.

The articles are mostly taken from news agencies.

There is an attempt to make it web 2.o standard—there is use of RSS technology, there are no tags and this makes the search of materials with the help of key words rather difficult.

There are no blogs.

Writing

The fonts are too small. It’s very difficult to read because of small line space. There are no sub-headings of the paragraphs. Some of the articles are too long.

Navigation

Navigation is fairly good but there is room for improvement. For instance, there’s such a thing called internal linking. Once you are reading a story, you will see other links which may say “if you liked this story, you will enjoy reading these as well”… and then you present five related stories.

There will be tabs like “most emailed story” or “most read story”. They are also internal links. These help keep the reader on your website which is important because the time spent on your website converts into money earned by you.