Features:
The Top Gear site has all that one would expect from a motoring magazine's website: reviews, news, features, competitions, buyers guides, etc. Blogs are a good feature to have on a journalistic website as they offer a more personal touch to the whole project. It has been said that we live in the age of the blog. Never before has blogging been more popular, with two blogs being born every second, this is indisputable. The blog section offers readers the chance to comment on stories and address journalists directly. The website also makes good use of RSS with that famililar orange icon making an appearance throughout. I believe RSS is a very important tool at the moment with all the talk of Web 2.0 banding around the internet, it could reflect badly upon the website if such tools were neglected. RSS gives users the chance to colsolidate any information from websites they visit often into one convenient page using online applications such as Google Reader and Bloglines.
The website also has a section for video content - making the site more of a multimedia experience. The videos are quite limited but they do offer users a chance to recap what has been most prominent in the Top Gear television series. I believe the site aims to be both informative and entertaining. The buyers guides are a very useful feature as they are a sleeker, searchable version of the back pages of the magazine itself.
The Top Gear Magazine is promoted quite well on the front page, but not so heavily as to seem like a visually intrusive attempt at self promotion - all we see is a cover photograph, an additional picture and a tagline. Simple and to the point.
Test drives are nicely featured on the main page and throughout under the heading, 'Drives' for quick and easy access to reviews. The developers have obviously considered their visitors' needs - why they are visiting the site in the first place.
The wallpapers section is a classic feature. Having a Top Gear wallpaper is an everyday reminder of the site's presence as you will be staring at a Top Gear logo every time you view your desktop.
Most websites rely heavily on advertising for income. Obviously, the bigger and more widely read the website is, the more money advertisers are willing to pay. The Top Gear website, for example, uses three banners on its main page. These banners are designed so as to fit in with the overall style of the website, which was most likely a requirement of the web designers. A brash, overbearing banner will undoubtedly turn off any visitors and it makes the site look somewhat tacky.
Google AdSense is a hugely popular tool for generating income via a website. This service provides websites with relevent advertising using text, images and/or video. Income in generated on a pay-per-click basis; meaning, money is made every time a visitor to your website clicks on one of your AdSense adverts.
The use of online games within a website is a good method of getting your visitors to come back regularly. The Top Gear website has several games; the featured game being a 3D Mazda racing game which is quite clearly earning them some sponsorship money.
A select number of magazines and newspapers are now offering online editions alongside their print publications. Last year, the Telegraph were one of the first to launch a condensed afternoon edition of the newspaper for readers to download for free. The digital version of the Telegraph was a PDF that was printable to A4 paper. Now, however, they seem to have replaced this edition with full text versions of the paper with searchable pages and enhanced navigation by topic. This is not a free service - a weekly subscription will cost you £4.99. This is quite a brave move, as they must believe people will be willing to pay that amount rather than stick to the articles the Telegraph regularly publish on their website.
Similarly, The Guardian and Observer offer a paid-for digital edition of their daily newspapers - again, full text editions. These papers however offer a pay-as-you-go system as well as a subcription-based service. For £1.50, one can view the last thirteen Guardian issues and last ten editions of the Observer. This is good value, but of course, the line between a free newspaper and one you have to pay for is quite broad. Users are becoming increasingly adventurous where current affairs are concerned as they have so many options - free newspapers, journalistic blogs, digital broadsheets and tabloids, and of course newspaper websites such as Guardian Unlimited.
The Week magazine recently published an online edition focusing on environmental issues in this kind of format.
“Bringing our readers an extra issue in a digital format echoes the environmental issues we’re trying to highlight,” said Justin Smith, president and publisher of The Week in New York, which is part of Dennis Publishing.
(Freepress, 2007)
The Charlotte Observer, based in North Carolina, USA announced plans to create a customised two-page newspaper for its subscribers:
Here is how it works: The source for the personalised paper is a designated website where subscribers first visit to answer 13 questions so the newspaper can gauge interests, whether it is in business, sports, politics, etc. For each answer, an RSS feed is assigned, already created from The Observer (different blogs, websites, etc.), or users can create their own RSS feeds. At that point, the software sends the feeds to a pagination program and it is formatted onto a page (some minor manual intervention).
(IFRA, 2007)
This particular newspaper is using its customised content to enable more relevent and specific advertising, which is more likely to result in follow-up sales. This means that advertising with one of these services has much more worth.
Of course, the idea of a personalised newspaper is not completely new. The concept has been around for some time, and an obvious variation of this concept is the RSS model. Services such as Google Reader and Bloglines, which I mentioned earlier offer users the option to have the latest articles from their favourite current-affairs websites and blogs on one page.