A few months ago I was asked to design a News Display System for a Content Managements Website System called the Unisite Business Suite. The company I currently work for, Sesalos, asked me to design the system to be a news system that connects into social networking and display in the most user friendly manner.
The system was aptly named News 2.0 and can be seen on this website. I am quite proud of the system because it was the first system that I had designed for web development.
The first aspect to get right was the RSS Feed so that the News system used a technology that would extend into the future of the internet world. Once the RSS technology was sorted out we were able to integrate News 2.0 into other global RSS technology such as Feedburner (recently bought out by Google).
The next aspect is to make the news on the News system easy to distribute by the public viewing the news. With simple ‘calls to action’ to print this article, email to a friend, share on facebook, delicious, muti, stumbleupon, digg, reddit and newsvine.
The social networking is important but the trend to use social networks to communicate and share news in South Africa is still emerging. Due to this emergence the social networks are necessary to give the system longevity. However should we only rely on social networks to distribute news in SA we would not experience a high distribution of the news by the public. Using ‘calls to action’ that are easy to use and easily understood by the public, is the only way to encourage users to complete the actions.
To encourage the interaction of the users with the website owners I added a comments section that emails the authors of the posts whenever there is a comment on an article they have written. I then encourage the authors of the posts to answer to comments in order to show that the user comments are valued.
Finally we added a Video addition that display relevant video’s to the article. The videos need to be loaded to You Tube. This You Tube link adds extra SEO benefits for the article and provides a stronger user experience.
The News 2.0 system has been a success as it taps into current and future internet marketing elements, and provides an interactive and interesting user experience that is current and visually appealing. There are other technologies that were added that aid the design aspects and selection of the most popular articles, but this article is getting too long now!
