I have been reading news on the Web for over eight years mostly through RSS feeds that flow into what Dave Winer calls the River of News. And for years I have been frustrated with magazine Web sites that are overly complicated. Go to the typical trade magazine Web site–especially the home page–and you can’t figure anything out.
Magazine print people were firm in the belief that the home page had to sell advertisers and readers on the complete coverage of the magazine. And they had to have many columns of jumbled up content of news, ads, and everthing else they archive. But they make it darn near impossible to find the news.
So I’m proud to say that the Web team at Automation World has been able to totally re-create the Web site into the River of News format. You can return every day and see the latest news, articles, videos, products and everything else. They also greatly simplified navigation. We stepped back and defined the major buckets of areas of coverage and eliminated the complexities of other ways to navigate. After all, what’s the normal way of navigating on the Web? Search, of course. So our enhanced search along with behind the scenes programming that serves up related articles will all enhance user experience.
Check it out. Let me know what you think–either what you like or where we can continue to improve.
