Now to discuss how Web 2.0 (you might have heard of it) could help us in making our Canvas site. Looking at what works on conventional news sites has helped me to consider what may be effective for us.
Comments: As Web 2.0 is all about interactivity, it makes sense to include a way of getting feedback from visitors. After discussing this we decided the best way for this would be to include a ‘leave comment’ section after each article or story. By doing this it allows two way interactivity, i.e. it is not just us telling people things with no feedback. Users will also be able to discuss issues which affect them – keeping the discussion in the relevant place.
RSS Feeds: All news sites have plenty of RSS feeds, so even if it is just to keep Canvas in line with other sites then these would be good to include. Obviously, as Canvas comes out only every few months it does not generate enough copy to warrant having its own feeds. A way we can work around this could be selecting other feeds relevant to the subject matter of our site, such as a feed for national student news.
Multimedia content: We can certainly use multimedia to our advantage and, indeed, was one of the main ways we discussed as to how we can use Canvas online to extend what is in Canvas the newspaper. In a paper, you cannot add video content or slideshows, but online you can. It is also a tried and tested way of breaking up pages of text to stop the reader becoming bored. So we will certainly looking to embed videos, probably as sidebar content. In the ‘your union’ page we will use flash to display photos of union events as a slideshow.
Blogs: We briefly discussed including blogs on the site, either blogs for the individual writers or as a ‘Canvas online blog’. Blogs are a good way of complementing traditional news writing with opinion, provoking further debate and increasing user interest which, in turn will lead to more traffic to the site. We decided early on not to include a blog straight away but discuss it again once the site was established.
Search: We talked about including an in-site search engine so users can search to find content they require. I have looked on other sites and find search engines a very important tool to make a site easier to navigate. This said, due to the small amount of content we originally need to navigate, this feature is not necessary at the moment.
