Raleigh-Durham local tv station Web site wral.com has expanded its tv capacities to include online stories through its Web site. The site’s home page differs from newspaper Web sites that I have frequented because it lacks a dominant image in the left-hand corner. Overall, I don’t think this takes away from the accessibility of the page. Rather, there are several top stories (about five) that are posted on the top of the page and that include small images and blurbs.
Obviously, a tv station should have an advantage over other media because the nature of their job is to take video, edit it and broadcast it to a wide audience. I think it’s good that the site clearly labels which articles have video content. I also like that in the upper right part of the day there is a today’s top videos section. That helps the site user know which clips might be of particular interest to them.
I also liked the Triangle411 data center that the site links to. It reminded me a lot of the (Raleigh) News & Observer’s new GoTriangle Web site efforts. The 411 version includes information about automobiles, pets and travel, among others.
One area that I think the site could improve in is linking to other articles within its articles (or other sites). It’s great that a tv station is doing news articles, but they need to take it a step further to make that information more interactive and to allow their site users to dig even deeper into the content. I also would work to introduce blogs to the site, to allow for some more community discussion.
