Norgdom

Some many months ago I stumbled across some test pages for The West’s new site. Other than a slightly modernised logo I couldn’t really see much difference between it and what they were doing at at time.

But then came the news that yourworldisabouttochangeonmonday.com.au - don’t bother taking the fifteen minutes to type that in, because The West’s promo URL never appeared to be working in the first place.

I was intrigued. They must have done a lot of work since I last saw the test pages then. But I was wrong.

The fact that they pitched their new site as so groundbreaking is quite perplexing. Do they really think it is that great? Does anyone at The West actually use the internet? For news?

There is no RSS Feed, it’s hard to navigate, it’s full of two to three-day-old AAP news stories and any comments left on the site have to be emailed in, with this disclaimer:

Please provide your name, address and telephone number if you would like your comments to be considered for publication.

I’m not too sure where these comments, sorry, emails go exactly once they have been considered.

Despite the concerned emails people sent me when The West advertised the site, I actually would love a decent on-line news service here in WA. We deserve a decent news site from our only daily paper. I am not worried because I believe the concepts behind PerthNorg and our committment to remaining a user-generated local news community is different and good enough to survive outside of the internet starved Perth news scene. What was The West’s motivation for launching the site in such a mess? Maybe they were getting worried, having been beaten to the market, by the amazingly similar PerthNow.

I know I’m not the only one who thinks little of The West’s attempt at an online presence. I think Hourann summed up things nicely over at his blog The Pencil Guy.

On that note, see you round the Norg…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.