Good: launching a new site
Stupendously Bad: Using AFR.com technology
I don’t know where to sart – such a frustrating experience from a new site..
The articles are displayed in flash. You can’t copy, highlight with a mouse as you read, change the size of the reading window or scroll using the mouse button. In short a decidedly unpleasant reading experience.
This is the article window – look but do not touch is the message.
Worse yet, there are different kinds of media as well. Can you tell which link sends you what media in the screenshot below?
The editor’s pick article gives, no kidding, a 404, “Fast facts” is a flash text article and “Asia Pacific IT leaders survey” is an annoying pdf that pops up, even in Safari where reading pdfs is built in.
In the .multimedia section, the first (IPO bubble) article gives a video, as does the second, but the third is another flash based ‘text’ article. Actually that text article is allegedly a blog. Forget about commenting on the blog of course – it looks exactly the same as the other flash text articles. Meanwhile the text articles opens in their own space, but the videos have other articles around them.
So the site is making me think, which makes me frustrated and I’m getting so hung up on the usability that I won’t read the articles. I feel sorry for the journalists. I feel sorry for me – it is hell visiting that site.
At least it is free. It will remain free right?
Lance Wiggs 
Having spent most of today trying to reconcile myself with the fact that I can’t do anything much with my allocated computer profile – like installing Flash or accessing my email – I must disagree with your take on the new MISAUS site.
Locking down sites and preventing access to useful and interesting content is quite the rage with MIS now. There are big cost-savings to be had by forcing employees to use their own systems that actually allow them to do the work they’re supposed to. The MISAUS site reflects this, I believe.
Isn’t that why the archives are behind some registration wall that means nobody will get to read them? :)
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Hey Lance. Thanks for the feedback. I’m the acting online editor for MISaustralia.com and worked with Fairfax Business Media’s online team developing the site.
I understand where you’re coming from, and would just say watch this space. For example, on the immediate horizon is an update to the blog architecture which was not completed before the launch date. Comments, permalinks and RSS are being integrated across the site.
I’d disagree with you on reading ease in that you can easily change the text size to improve readability.
Regarding other issues, it might not be obvious to the outsider, but the technical challenges behind what we’ve done are not insignificant. In order to give people (free) access to content from AFR.com (a flash-based subscription site), we’ve developed a html front end that embeds the flash viewer. So the site itself is a hybrid of html and flash in order to give people free access to technology related content from the AFR, and a host of other IT content sources. And into that mix we’ve added videos and my podcast that’s served up from a hosting provider.
To answer your question, there’s no plan that I’m aware of to charge people for access to the site. We’ll take a look at the other points you raise and see if there are ways to improve usability.
Mark Jones, MISaustralia.com
filteredmedia.com.au
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Hi Mark – thanks for watching and commenting.
I’m hapy to hear there will be no charge – well done.
While I’m sure the technical issues were large to get the AFR flash content across – I’m not sure I understand why you don’t you just get it sent over in text form and have your editors place it into a decent CMS/website? It’s pretty sad that the site is lumbered with a technology that is so clearly unusable.
Ditto with the audio and video content – these are not tough issues to manage in a half-decent CMS these days, but the devil is in the website usability.
Finally – No – I cannot easily change text size. Yes there is a slider, but I don’t want to take my cursor and eyes off the text, and so use ctrl-mouse wheel or keystrokes to zoom.
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The short answer to your question is that we’ve worked within the bounds of an existing infrastructure and created something that delivers a higher level of automation on the back end. Editors needs to spend more time editing and less time dealing with CMS systems.
And when you’re dealing with a high volume of content, and content types, it’s a tough proposition to maintain a number of separate CMS systems. One of the advantages of our site is we have access to the Fairfax CMS which is an incredible warehouse of content.
Regarding text size, that is probably something more easily fixed (although I’m not sure how soon). I’ll pass on the feedback to our developers. Usability issues aside, I hope you find value in the content!
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