Competitor Analysis

So our first task of the new Semester is to begin creating a website for our student newspaper - Canvas. Before that, though, I will take a look at some other websites that come under the category - RIVALS!

Firstly, I found Nouse. This is the University of York's website for their newspaper and I have to say, in general, it comes across as a very well laid out site, not dissimilar from The Guardian website and in fact, might well have been modelled on this.

It is not clear, at first glance, whether it is actually the website for their student paper, but scrolling down the home page you will find the archive in PDF format which suggests it is.

The site has some of the features that we talked about in class. The navigation bar has, I assume, the same categories which appear in the paper version, which allows someone to go through the site in a similar way as they would the paper. Another thing we had previously discussed was adding multimedia as an extension to the paper - this has been done on Nouse with the inclusion of Podcasts. They can add news this way allowing another dimension which is worth looking at for us I think.

A downside to Nouse is that by including a lot on their homepage, it becomes very cluttered and, in my opinion, are better off confining most things on this page to their relevant section - keeping the home page for the latest updates perhaps.

The second website I looked at was Varsity. This is the website of the Cambridge students' paper. It is Cambridge so of course I expect big things from this one.

I was right to, I guess the huge range of subjects on offer at Cambridge allows for a large combined effort, so I think for us, we can learn a lot from looking at this site.

What first stood out for me, was the much more concise home page, with just a few articles/features on display, it immediately becomes much more pleasing to look at than Nouse.

The individual categories: news, sports etc, are laid out with the main story surrounded by the rest, which I like a lot and it seems as though lots of effort has gone into planning the design of the site.

The stories throughout the site are laid out in columns, like they would be in print, which suggests they want the website to be kept close to the paper, more or less as an add-on. After our discussions in class it seems as if we want to be a lot more than our paper, so perhaps columns would be a good feature to avoid.

Both sites have the pages on .pdf - making me think it is a good idea to do this from the InDesign files rather than spend time typing them all up, allowing us to re-purpose some of our articles and not all of them.