The Irish Independent has just relaunched its website, Independent.ie, which heralds the end to registration and the beginning of a far more interactive site for the national newspaper.
This follows the relaunch of The Irish Times website Ireland.com which happened in November of last year and is another step forward for the online presence of Irish print media, which has been lagging way before its international counterparts.
The most striking thing about the site on first arrival is the thick red banner that sits just below the now neater site logo. The banner contains a single image and strapline relating to a particular story, but does seem perhaps a little bit bare given the size of it – that said, having too much text and image on it would probably make it even more distracting so that may be the logic there.
The very top of the page has some nice information like date, day and weather gauge / temperature (does this relate to the reader’s location, using IP as a way of placing them? Mine seems to always say Dublin, anyway).
The newspaper content runs down the left-hand side and seems to sit well – not looking too squashed but still allowing for plenty of space to its right. Beside this there are some novel features on the front page – an “editors choice” column, a breaking news box with independent tabs for various sections, a “most popular” and “most emailed” article list, a “Today in Pictures” section and some linked quotes to they day’s opinion pieces.
The links on the main page to IN&M’s classifieds websites makes sense for the company and adds a nice interconnectivity that The Irish Times has attempted to do on its own site. That said the Loadzajobs search box, while a good idea, takes a whole column to itself despite it being quite small… why not put search boxes for the other classified sites too?
The drop down menus for the main site and the newspaper itself are a little easier to use than before and bring you to the same clean layout for each of the paper’s sections (business, world news etc.).
The Entertainment section is the only one that breaks the site’s format with a colour scheme of black, pink and grey as opposed to white and red (and I do like the scrollable images for that particular section on the main page).
One of the better additions to the site is the ability to comment on articles – although it doesn’t seem to be activated on all articles at the moment, including some of the opinion pieces, where it would probably be most useful.
Damien’s request for RSS feeds on the main page has also been granted, with a button at the bottom of each section.
Overall the makeover moves Independent.ie back in direct competition with Ireland.com which had been steaming ahead until now… both sites have their unique functions – Ireland.com ahead of the fold with blogging and Independent.ie ahead with comment-enabled stories – but Independent.ie makes up for anything it lacks by throwing open its doors completely, dropping even the free subscription that existed before. I wonder if they’ll continue to block Kevin Myers’ weekly column from the website, however.
Hopefully this is just the beginning of changes there – I expect Independent.ie to keep adding features to the site just like The Irish Times has done recently.
Fingers crossed those at Thomas Crosbie will take note of this – their sites have been in need of a makeover for some time and The Examiner and Sunday Business Post are now the only two national broadsheets with very dated websites.