Ireland.com relaunch
Tuesday, November 14th, 2006I may not be first off the block, but The Irish Times website will receive a pretty impressive overhaul as of tomorrow, with big changes and improvements on the way (despite the lack of blogs!).
Besides the design changes, which seem to make navigation that little bit easier, their Breaking News service will become free, RSS will be incorporated at a deeper level and video footage will also be used (something that has become quite common across the sea).
Sadly articles from the newspaper itself are still paid-only, although they are at least offering the first paragraph for free (one paragraph at a time, says you).
I’m disappointed that there’s no sign of a blog-element, but that’s not to say it isn’t coming, and I’m still confident that it will happen in the near future. I’d be surprised if the new site wasn’t designed with additional offerings in mind, anyway.
Generally speaking it’s great news for online news in Ireland; The Irish Times website has always been the best going, and only suffered from it’s subscription-based offerings… now it has even greater potential to compete with it’s International alternatives. I look forward to giving it a test-drive tomorrow.
As a whole the world of online news in Ireland seems to be shaping up pretty nicely; besides Ireland.com, the new RTE.ie is due to be unveiled soon while Damien notes some rumblings at Village.ie and I personally know of one other publication that’s preparing for big changes very soon. Finally, we’re getting somewhere!
Blogs elsewhere
November 15th, 2006 at 1:32 pm
All that’s needed now is actual journalism to fill up all those nice containers.
And aren’t the Breaking News crowd all regularly replaced short term contractors? Maybe now their work will be the only public representation of the Irish Times on line, it, and they, might be valued a little more.
Rather than always feeling like a forgotton corner of reprints, press releases and wire reports. At least to this reader.
November 15th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
I’m taking a while to get used to the IT design overhaul. It is an improvement, I suppose. I just wish they were a bit more judicious in their sizing of logos so that those of sneeking a peek during work time don’t have to announce to the world “HEY EVERYONE I’M READING THE PAPER DURING WORK TIME”.
The Village magazine website really, really needs an overhaul - it is horrible to navigate, invites readers to make comments which it then doesn’t publish. Even the non-libellous ones.
May 16th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
[…] follows the relaunch of The Irish Times website Ireland.com which happened in November of last year and is another step forward for the […]