washingtonpost.com dual home page strategy gets positive response
WashingtonPost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady says the feedback on the site's move to seperate local and national home pages has been mostly positive.
The new approach was launched mid-July in response to user studies that showed local and national/international users often have varied preferences for top news when accessing the site through its home page.
"As for the two home pages, the feedback has been largely positive," Brady tells CyberJournalist.net. "We're now able to do day-parting on the local page because, for the first time in the site's history, we know the time zone of a large majority of the people using a home page. So we're promoting traffic cameras during rush hour, more aggressively promoting weather stories, etc. It's really given us an outlet for local stories that historically we've always shown some restraint with, since so many of our home page users are national and international. So I think we feel liberated.
"The only issues that have been raised consistently by readers are the lack of a notification on the page that signals which page you're on, which we're working on, and also a concern that there's no direct link between the local and national/international pages, which is intentional, since our local page is not a local-only page, but a locally focused page. So you're not missing any national and international news if you sign up for the local home page, and you don't want any local news if you've signed up for the national/international home page. So we felt a toggle would create more confusion than it would resolve. But, as I said, overall, it's been popular and the feedback pretty benign."
Aug 04, 2005 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(0)
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