Local News Search and Curation Site

Mullins07

Hi,

Please have a look at my latest project http://locally.ie and let me know what you think.

I am adding new counties all the time but each one has to be configured separately which takes time. It is still good enough to review though as the basic idea is there for several counties now.

Thanks!

nager

Personally I wouldn't have any use for a site like this (plus I don't like aggregator sites as they are simply trying to make money from other publishers content).

That said, from a design point of view it looks and works fine.
Just one thing - would you not be better to have the content appear within the same page, or even open up in a 'blank' page - so once you click on an item to read more you are not being redirected off your site.

Mullins07

nager wrote: »

Personally I wouldn't have any use for a site like this (plus I don't like aggregator sites as they are simply trying to make money from other publishers content).

That said, from a design point of view it looks and works fine.
Just one thing - would you not be better to have the content appear within the same page, or even open up in a 'blank' page - so once you click on an item to read more you are not being redirected off your site.

I don't believe that aggregation is simply a matter of trying to make money from other content. Content needs to be curated to make it easy to find what is relevant. It also needs to be aggregated to collect similar content in one location. Providing this service takes effort and if locally.ie doesn't do it, someone else eventually will.

I had a look at supposedly local news providers for my village and they were displaying absolutely irrelevant and out of date content. That is a blatant attempt to link bait and make money for a crap service.

Good idea to open the articles in a new tab. I have implemented it just now. Thanks.

tricky D

Mullins07 wrote: »

Good idea to open the articles in a new tab. I have implemented it just now. Thanks.

It's not a good idea to remove this option from the user. Basic UX 101 says leave the user to decide whether they want to open in a new tab or not.

The homepage is too text heavy. You might consider having a county list which when a county is chosen imports the town list via AJAX. An optional remember my choice cookie could also be used at this point. A county map could also be used for redundant nav.

There's no good reason why this kind of text is in an image: http://locally.ie/static/images/logo/thurles.png

You should get a contact form too.

ETA:
Consider using breadcrumb navigation for counties on the town pages eg. have county > town below the header.

You also need to work on the SEO. You have all the article headings as h1 which will incur a penalty. One h1 per page only at this moment in time is the rule.

There's also an issue with listings pages performance. My browsers' resources are getting hammered to the point of one of them hanging completely. I'm guessing that too many calls are being made to too many scripts/widgets. Consider paginating each listings page to mitigate this.

Mullins07

tricky D wrote: »

It's not a good idea to remove this option from the user. Basic UX 101 says leave the user to decide whether they want to open in a new tab or not.

Yeah, I think I agree. I will probably change it back.

tricky D wrote: »

The homepage is too text heavy. You might consider having a county list which when a county is chosen imports the town list via AJAX. An optional remember my choice cookie could also be used at this point. A county map could also be used for redundant nav.

This is something that is on my to-do list and I keep saying I will do it after I add the next county. This time I WILL do it after the next county.

tricky D wrote: »

There's no good reason why this kind of text is in an image: http://locally.ie/static/images/logo/thurles.png

I could not reliably reproduce the logo in that exact form using CSS. The letter spacing is very close so I need to produce it in GIMP. I could possibly use an image processing library to generate the logos dynamically. There is extra work here for the moment but I am happy to do it to get the logo the way I want it. The drawback on the user side is the image download but the PNGs are small.

tricky D wrote: »

You should get a contact form too.

Will add to my to-do list.

tricky D wrote: »

You also need to work on the SEO. You have all the article headings as h1 which will incur a penalty. One h1 per page only at this moment in time is the rule.

Thanks for the tip. I can easily use DIVs instead of the H1. I did not realise this would effect SEO.

tricky D wrote: »

There's also an issue with listings pages performance. My browsers' resources are getting hammered to the point of one of them hanging completely. I'm guessing that too many calls are being made to too many scripts/widgets. Consider paginating each listings page to mitigate this.

Yes. This I have noticed. It is the FB widgets. The like buttons and the comment buttons are slow as hell. I have read about a method of only loading the widgets as the user scrolls down the page. I might try that.

Thanks for all the good advice. It is much appreciated.

tricky D

Mullins07 wrote: »

I could not reliably reproduce the logo in that exact form using CSS. The letter spacing is very close so I need to produce it in GIMP. I could possibly use an image processing library to generate the logos dynamically. There is extra work here for the moment but I am happy to do it to get the logo the way I want it. The drawback on the user side is the image download but the PNGs are small.

css 'letter-spacing' property should get them to close up. It can be set to a negative value. It's desirable to have this as text for locality based keywords SEO-wise and I would argue that that is much more important than the precise typograhy you are looking for.

Mullins07 wrote: »

Thanks for the tip. I can easily use DIVs instead of the H1. I did not realise this would effect SEO.

h2's should do just fine, just not h1's.

Mullins07 wrote: »

Yes. This I have noticed. It is the FB widgets. The like buttons and the comment buttons are slow as hell. I have read about a method of only loading the widgets as the user scrolls down the page. I might try that.

I reckon that still bring things to a crawl as users scroll down. Ie. it'll just delay the poor performance not prevent it. Still reckon you'd be better off breaking the page into multiple smaller ones (pagination).

Mullins07

tricky D wrote: »

css 'letter-spacing' property should get them to close up. It can be set to a negative value. It's desirable to have this as text for locality based keywords SEO-wise and I would argue that that is much more important than the precise typograhy you are looking for.


h2's should do just fine, just not h1's.


I reckon that still bring things to a crawl as users scroll down. Ie. it'll just delay the poor performance not prevent it. Still reckon you'd be better off breaking the page into multiple smaller ones (pagination).

I removed the FB like buttons and the Twitter buttons. The articles can be shared by clicking the article titles. Much faster now without all the extra stuff loading.

I changed the H1 to H2. Thanks for that tip.

I am willing to accept the loss of the keyword for the locality name by using an image. I would not sacrifice appearance for SEO. I really want that logo look to be 100%. Surely the ALT tag is searched for SEO anyway?

I also added an image map for the main page as you originally commented about. Needed a kick up the a**e to get it done and you provided that.

Thanks for all the great advice.

tricky D

Mullins07 wrote: »

I am willing to accept the loss of the keyword for the locality name by using an image. I would not sacrifice appearance for SEO. I really want that logo look to be 100%. Surely the ALT tag is searched for SEO anyway?

That text is your h1 material for those listing pages which gets a much higher weighting than an alt which only gets the same weighting as regular text. How much weighting h1 gets by SE's is unknown, but for a h1, I'd guestimate around 4 times. I also don't understand why you are so adamant on having the town name and strapline as a graphic. I'm not talking about the locally.ie logo. It should be easy to get similar typefacing using Google fonts or some other font importing method instead of images. There's also the greater overhead of managing images compared to the lower one for text. It just makes me scratch my head as to why you wouldn't do it that way. Anyhoo, it's your call.

gl

Chet Zar

Design/layout needs a lot of work I would say - your home page is made up mostly of ads which screams all the wrong things. You need a descriptor on the home page, a tag-line of some sort to hook people in and first and foremost let them know what the site is all about - this just needs to be a simple description of what the site is about.

Has the potential to be a nice site but you need to take another look at your home page look and feel - once you click in to a region it all looks much better.

Mullins07

Chet Zar wrote: »

Design/layout needs a lot of work I would say - your home page is made up mostly of ads which screams all the wrong things. You need a descriptor on the home page, a tag-line of some sort to hook people in and first and foremost let them know what the site is all about - this just needs to be a simple description of what the site is about.

Has the potential to be a nice site but you need to take another look at your home page look and feel - once you click in to a region it all looks much better.

Thanks for that advice. I have removed the ads from the front page and added a simple description. Makes it less in your face. Could do with more work but it's a bit better now.