CRITIQUE: TRINIDAD EXPRESS

Trinidad & Tobago Express is one of the three daily newspapers in Trinidad & Tobago. Trinidad does not have a distinction between broadsheet and tabloid formats, and the Express is a well-respected newspaper. It commenced in 1967 and registered its website www.trinidadexpress.com in 1997.

Of the three dailies, its website is the most frequently linked to, with 119,786 references as at 13/12/08 according to www.marketleap.com

First impressions… ad-attack and ‘huh?’-galore

At first click, the website’s animated ads on the homepage leap out at the viewer.

Like many other Trinidadian newspapers and websites such as its rival newsday.co.tt, trinidadexpress.com places heavy emphasis on the national colours of red, white and black.

The whiteness gives it a nice, clean layout that enhances readability, and the redness of the tabs for links and as backgrounds for headings works well against the black text.

However the blue flashing Clico ad in the middle of the banner on the homepage jars with that notion immediately: blue signifies UK – the source of former colonisation, and US – the source of cultural saturation, two countries citizens try to maintain a particular distance from when it comes to national identity.

Granted, the site needs ads – but the position of this one is in poor taste considering its colour scheme:

 

As the eye skims down the page, it is assaulted with more ads, most of them flashing.

Though the website obeys the rule of thirds, the entire far right column is dedicated to ads – not to mention those interspersed in the middle column.

If you open any news article, there is a vertical column of “Ads by Google” in the middle of the screen right where you are reading the story, which is very distracting.

Ad in the middle of the page next to the story

 

On the homepage, only two stories — the main one and one other — have pictures to go with them.

After every story, the website states “there are 0 community-posted events. Click to read” – this is redundant.

Underlining links would be sufficient instead of directing the viewer “click to read” endless times, and “community-posted” is also unnecessary.

There is no multimedia whatsoever evident from the front page (and this site is owned by the same company that owns a TV Station, so video should theoretically be available…)

There are links to One Caribbean Media Limited and to the 2008/09 Budget and to the draft constitution of the country – commendable, perhaps, as this reflects the interests of citizens in the economy and national identity, BUT not necessary to have at the top of the page, especially before the navigation.

Navigation… where oh where do I go from here?

The website, operated by One Caribbean Media, functions for both Trinidad Express and CCN TV6.

But available information on TV6 is poor: when you click on TV6 (way down on the left), you are directed to a page that offers TV6 features, and clicking on that brings you to a page that is virtually blank:

 

For no explicable reason, on the homepage there are links to webcams showing views from the newspaper’s offices (seemingly only there to advertise for the sponsor, Chancellor’s Hotel).

Even worse, when you click on these links, one of them is so fuzzy it makes you think your eyesight has gone wonky, and apart from the other one being almost pitch black, it also shows Independence Sq. as at 21/10/07 (we are now in December 2008!) though according to accompanying text, it refreshes every 5 minutes from 6:00AM-6:00PM.

 

The search bar is virtually invisible – you have to scroll down significantly in a quest for the search bar:

VOILA!!!!! EUREKA!!!!! SEARCH BAR!!!!

 

The search facility is poor:

• You must specify a date range to get anything beyond the most recent articles.
• When you search for something, automatically-generated results render the majority of the page white.
• The results show only the headline, date and article number. The article number is irrelevant and all that white space can be used more effectively, e.g. photos and/or an opening sentence to explain what the article is about.

 

There is also duplication of links:

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• The navigation of “Business”, “Sports”, “Letters”, “Features” etc is on the left and also on the bottom of the page.

• On the left, there is a link to “E-paper”; on the right a photo link “Subscribe to our e-Edition”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The main navigation, however poorly placed, is commendably consistent as you click through — both the bottom-page and left-side navigation.

 

Writing… hitting the text-wall

The writing follows Jakob Nielsen’s rules in some aspects.

With the writing falling in the middle column of the screen, it does not have too many words across one line of text, usually around 6-8.

However, it does not fully obey the “F-pattern” of writing: some sentences are much too long, and some are grouped together unnecessarily, leaving chunks of text:

Chunks of text: not 'scannable'

This should be broken up, and in some instances it can be placed in bullet-point or list format such as the last paragraph of the story above.

There are also no clickable hypertext links within the wall of text. Hypertext indicates that the writer has done proper research for the claims the article makes, and has looked at other sources that he/she is happy to have the reader consult for verification.

There is also no list of articles that many be connected to the one you are reading. This results in the reader losing interest after that particular story — whereas the point of a website is to keep the reader within the web of information.

It also does not embolden the first sentence; most websites such as the BBC do this.

There are no sub-headings between the main body of text of the article, and some sentences are much too long.

It appears as though stories have been copied verbatim from the paper format.

 

Content… Web 2.0?

On the plus side, the font used throughout the site is Arial which is a web-friendly Sans Serif font.

In line with the Web 2.0 world that offers users to share content, when reading an article there is the option to “Email to a friend”. There is also a “View printable version” option.

Though it allows for interaction with its audience via “community-posted comments”, www.trinidadexpress.com  does not qualify as 2.0 website because of its lack of multimedia.

The lack of subheadings and clickable links within the text of the story, as well as the absence of connected stories, may cause the reader to lose interest.

Its overall structure is poor, some of its content is very outdated, it is bogged down with ads, and it depends too heavily on the print format.

It seems as though not much thought was put into its design — for example, for usability, the first thing should be to move the search bar to the top, such as with other news sites, including its rival newsday.co.tt:

 

Main suggested improvements:

• Its search bar needs to be wider, more visible, and at the top (not a tiny square far down the page).
• Its navigation should be placed at the top like the Guardian and the Times, or at the left side directly under the banner like the BBC.
• It should also be sectioned into more categories than the navigation links it presently has, e.g. adding in “Lifestyle”, “Politics”, “Education”, “Science & Technology”, “World News” etc.
• There should be more photos — and larger ones.
• There should be a much better organisation of stories than the list at the bottom with no categorised structure or date of the articles.
• There should be hypertext links, connected stories, and also “killer quotes” extracted from the text
• There should be less ads and more news-related multimedia.
• There should also be blogs — the inkling of this idea does not seem to have crossed the minds of the designers.

It is surprising that this is the most popular news site in Trinidad, but this can be attributed primarily to the paper format, which has prospered throughout the years.

The main plus about the site is the snapshot of the paper-edition’s front page, which is also done by the websites for the two other Trinidad dailies.

As a Trinidadian living abroad, I know exactly how much those that belong to the diaspora scattered around the globe enjoy looking at the front page to feel closer to home.