Plugging Away to the Future Online Setonian

After taking the time to review the Seton Hill University's (SHU) online newspaper, The Setonian Online in conjunction with a few award winning journalistic websites, I've realized that there's much this semester's Media Lab's class would be able to do in order to improve upon The Online Setonian.

The journalistic website A day in the life of a San Francisco Cabbie definitely put a few ideas into my head for the future. This website addressed a few of the quirks that's been bothering me for a while about The Online Setonian's color scheme and amount of scrolling per web page. 'A day in the life of a San Francisco Cabbie' presents a striking and directly related color scheme of black and yellow to its readers. This is smart; if you're writing about a cabbie's life, then you should probably have something in taxi colors. In comparison, The Online Setonian seems to imitate its print version almost too well with a washed out blending of gray tones. A good project for this semester's Media Lab class could be to produce a more lively-looking background/color scheme for The Setonian Online. It could be still look like a proper newspaper with the accompanying elements, but perhaps a bit of SHU's colors could be poured in as well.

'A day in the life' also presented its information in an organized manner to readers so as to virtually eliminate scrolling (all depends on your monitor size and how you prefer to view your web pages). The Setonian Online offers plenty of scrolling for readers. I know from personal experience (and academic) that web surfers don't want to be searching up and down a long page with a great deal of scrolling involved. By more efficiently coding the pages so that there would be less space in between each item, The Online Setonian would save its users from excessive scrolling.

The website South of Here also offered me a few ideas. The main background of the website is a colored and striking picture. More color pictures are also presented when viewing the articles pertinent to them. It would be a great asset to The Online Setonian to have colored photos of those that were printed in the print newspaper, The Setonian. It would also be possible to add more pictures online than those that were printed. These various additions would also make the website more aesthetically pleasing.

A significant factor that I observed in the websites 'A day in the life' and 'South of Here' was the well-planned link bars on each page of the websites. I believe that The Online Setonian presents too many links on side of the page and it would be better to condense them. Though it might take more time than this class will have this semester, it would perfect to have a link bar system to that of 'South of Here' where readers only need to place their mouse pointer over a link and all the links attached to it pop up.

A few last changes that might help The Online Setonian run a little more smoothly include updated staff profiles and possible video tags or video windows that first show up when the reader loads the full page of a story. All of the changes listed here might take a while, but I do think that they would help The Online Setonian operate a bit more fluidly.