TVNZ launched their new site yesterday. It’s a refreshing change, and a good one.
It’s pretty similar to one I look at to get West Australian News
Both of those screenshots are the entire height of my little mac portable. You really see very little content, with the focus directed to the main stories of the day which rotate.
TheWest, with the bigger pictures, checks in at 1.6mb, and then keeps grabbing pictures forever. TVNZ is at 1.4mb a bit smaller on the upload, but that is still a lot for the 40% of so on dialups. (Not that Stuff and NZHerald are much better).
I admit I was pretty sceptical of TheWest’s new site last year, but I am informed that their traffic numbers are actually doing really well since, and that is in the face of some new Fairfax competition in WAToday and News corps PerthNow.
The TVNZ and WAToday sites are great if you just want to get the top news – the rotating banners drive traffic to the vital few. They are harder to get deeper news from as they seem a bit tabloidish. That of course is their market.
Geekzone blogger Juha nails the vital difference between TVNZ and the APN/Fairfax sites:
“And please TVNZ… commission more local stories from local journos instead of filling the site with the usual Reuters rootarola wirecopy that everyone else carries. And, I mean good solid news and analysis, and not the usual opinion swamp that passes for journalism these days.”
Rupert Murdoch gets this – he is ramping up content creation at the Wall Street Journal. Fairfax, APN and TVNZ should all remember that while presentation is important, it’s the timely accurate pertinant content – in short news – that matters the most.
Disclosure: I’ve consulted to WA Newspapers recently (unlreated to theWest website) and Fairfax a while back
Lance Wiggs 
I’ve been thinking about the page sizes and people on dial-up… thing is, TVNZ is by its very nature a Fat Content Site. There’s lots of video and audio there, plus big pictures.
While I’m all for making things as efficient as possible, I don’t see how sites like TVNZ will ever work for dial-up users unless of course they go to the mobile, low-graphics pages (TVNZ provides these, unlike Fairfax).
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Yes an improvement but quite a few formatting issues when using IE 7.0….
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ooops, an example:
http://tvnz.co.nz/content/2417515
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I agree, any website that’s over a meg in size is crazy. Not just for dialup but also for anyone with semi-broadband e.g. those people stuck on the lower NZ broadband offerings.
However a quick look at the site itself shows they are not compressing their html or javascript so with a quick flick of a sys admins fingers they could probably bring the size down by a couple hundred of KB.
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