And now how fast the working day goes.
My boss was away for a few days so I thought I should show some initiative and get cracking with everything I remembered him having mentioned as being a good idea.
I love working on the home page. Having installed Fireshots and reacquainted myself with Powerpoint I am now happily immersed in the task at hand.
I've made contact with as many people as possible from the illegibly scrawled list randomly compiled at our meeting on my first day. People from different parts of the company - I wish I could remember some of their titles now - who have some connection and definitely an opinion about the site, where it's not working and how it could do its job better.
I see now why my boss would want to take on someone like me - not only is he too busy to be running around having airy fairy hypothetical meetings and playing with Firefox add-ons - it's also much more likely that his colleagues will respond frankly to someone they don't know. Also, I'm just a student - they're not likely to want to impress me; far more likely that I, in my wide-eyed, eager-to-please ignorance, will be serious and attentive and just grateful that a grown up is agreeing to have a serious conversation with me at all.
I had two meetings today - one with someone from the hard-copy newspaper and the other with someone from a sales orientated background. They said completely contrasting things, which couldn't be better for me in terms of my research. Both raised interesting points about the site.
A particularly salient observation that, embarrassingly, hadn't really occurred to me is that there is no such thing as good travel news. It's always about queues and plane crashes and never about peaceful sunny beaches - so why put it on your front page if you're a travel website? Why would someone want to buy a holiday from a site that's full of floods and droughts and terrorist attacks - and won't these have been reported in the main news site anyway?
Another issue raised was about scrolling. Our website has a remarkably short front page - especially compared to its parent site which seems to scroll for miles. I was thinking about this this evening when, serendipitously, I came across this post on 10,000 words.net:
Another misconception held over from newspaper days is that everything must be kept above the fold รข€” the imaginary line at the bottom of the browser where a user must scroll to see the rest of the content. Well the fold is an unnecessary design limitation.
"The fold" goes back to the days when newsstands were still relevant and important content was kept above the fold of the newspaper to grab the attention of passersby. Unlike newspapers and magazines, web browsers have scrollbars, a magnificent and less cumbersome invention. While the best and most important content should be placed near the top of the page, most users will indeed scroll to explore more of the site.
Clicktale found in its 2006 study that 76 percent of users who encountered pages with a scrollbar scrolled somewhat (up to two to three pages) and 23 percent of users scrolled all the way to the bottom of the page.
That's enough shop talk for now though. I should be researching the future of the printed word as part of some coursework I'm still working on.
It is with only a slight cringe that I admit that on the day it is due in, I am being taken to see Wicked at the Apollo by a friend; and I can't wait!
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