TrinidadExpress.com Criticism

... that the Trinidad Express leadeship hasn't fully grasped how to manage their website's content.

First, we have a letter from Sheldon Branche appearing in trinivoices.com.  Mr Branche asked for the Express to formally apologise and retract the statement in Ms Camini Marajh's CIB expose a few weeks back, where Mr Branche was listed as a Director of CIB.  Mr Branche was in fact the Assistant Secretary.  The Express Editor apologised for the error, but did so at the bottom of the letter in trinivoices.com.  It's now 1:39 p.m. Trinbago-time on 18 Apr 2010 and Mr Branche's name still appears in the original story on the trinidadexpress.com website.  So they apologised on one of their ancillary websites while the error continues to be displayed from their main website.  Why don't they put the apology at the bottom of the corrected story?  They need to understand that websites are not newsprint - if they made an error, correct it and/or apologise on the same page that the error was made.  If you can't correct it, then state why in a clear statement at the top of the article so future readers won't take your error as fact (like I had to do in December on this website).

Another example?  Before the Easter weekend, an article by Express Reporter Camille Bethel recommended that folks apply vinegar as first-aid for folks stung by the Portuguese Man-o-War.  However, several websites, from various authorities abroad (e.g. US and Australia) advise that vinegar should NOT be used.  I packaged the links and advice and sent it via e-mail to Ms Bethel and the Editor, with a request for them to confirm the details with local doctors and Prof Julian Kenny.  No acknowledgement and no retraction to date.

If they continue to make the same content errors as before, then folks can't help but conclude that they're happy to put lipstick on a pig.  Not all is lost though.  A Q&A article by Andy Johnson was published today, minus the name and role of the interviewee - so readers have no idea who Mr Johnson interviewed.  I see the link to the article has disappeared from the News homepage, so perhaps they're making corrections as I write this.

I second, third and fourth the issues you raised, Taran.  One tip: if you use Firefox to browse the website, get the NoSquint add-on. It allows you to change the text size/colour, change the background colour and disable background images, which would reduce the amount of red. It also stores these settings by website or as globally-applicable (i.e. website-independent) settings.

IMO, all the Trinidad news websites have significant room for improvement.  It's like the persons who designed them and publish articles on them don't use them.  If they tried to read their news ONLY via their websites for a week - heck, a day! - they would find all that I describe below.  Why the heck do they have websites that reflect such disregard for user-friendliness and competence?  I used to read the Guardian's website first, but after their website revamp last year made it much less user-friendly compared to their old site and the Express's, I started to read the Express's first.  Now, the Express has caught up with the Guardian's incompetence, so it doesn't matter which site I read first.  Go figure.  If they ever decide to become a paywall service without significant improvements in their website's format and content, then they'll lose me as a customer.

Problems I have with the new Express site (apart from what you've written):

• I read the articles on a 22-inch screen at max resolution (1680x1050).  I use this resolution to allow more desktop space (e.g. for multiple windows, or viewing applets).  For most websites, the default text is too small, so I just increase the text size via a browser feature or add-on (e.g. Ctrl-+).  In most cases, the text size would increase and simply re-justify automatically so I won't have to scroll to the right to see any text. The Express put their text almost like an image in a red-lined box and when I increase the size beyond 200%, text flows off the right-side of the screen.  The old website allowed me to increase text size beyond 200% without any problems.  I can increase the Guardian's text much more, so it is more user-friendly than the Express's for my poor eyesight.
• They continue to have problems displaying some characters of the extended character set, e.g. any non-English characters with accents.  This is a hold-over from the old website.
• I have no statistics - and this problem is rampant at ALL the T&T news websites - but it seems to me that the latest batch of writers has extended the legacy of the more experienced writers who don't know how to write using proper English.  Spelling, grammatical and punctuation errors occur far too frequently.  They have no idea how to use an apostrophe, and now even simple subject-verb matching seems too difficult.  I've written several editors about this over the last seven years but any improvement was short-lived (to top it off, only the Guardian's editors ever acknowledged my letter).
• The old website disabled right-click use - I suspect some bright person thought it would help prevent image theft. However, their script only worked in Internet Explorer.  So I started using Firefox - not to steal images, but to allow me to open up all the stories in separate tabs quickly to download in the background while I read the first couple of articles. That way, I don't have to click on a link, wait for it to download, read it, then click on another link and wait for that.  Overall, I save a lot of time with the right-click use.  This new website now disables the right-click on the homepages of each section in Firefox.  So I have to jump through more hoops to efficiently browse their website. Extremely counter-intuitive and -productive.  Why publish a website and then make it more difficult for your customers to browse? D'oh!
• Let's presume the idiot who approved this design wanted to control how we read articles - i.e, read articles sequentially.  If you click on a story, e.g. in the News homepage, the links to other stories published today in that section would appear at the bottom of the story's webpage. However, on days when there are a lot of News stories, not all the links would appear.  So you would have to click a link to read the story, then click the Back button on the browser to go back to the News homepage and then select another link. Ridiculous.
• Continuing the tradition of the old website, some stories would be clearly missing one or more paragraphs from the start of the article, e.g. I've read ones which referred to a person by only their surname, so the paragraph which fully introduced the person was omitted. More often, the article would end suddenly - sometimes mid-sentence!
• Also continuing an age-old tradition - and the Guardian is also guilty of this - in Q&A articles where some VIP is interviewed and their responses are provided with limited editing, they don't format the questions' text in bold or a different colour to differentiate it from the VIP's responses' text.  So I have to sometimes guess if a question was actually posed by the reporter or if it was stated by the VIP.  Sometimes, the reporter won't be asking a question, but just making a statement to prompt the VIP - so without differentiating the text, readers can easily assume that the VIP said what the reporter said.
• The website's designers still have no clue about the power of hyperlinks.  If you have several stories on the same theme, and refer to them in the text, why not make that referral text a hyperlink to the other story?  Don't they know how ridiculous it is to read on their website: "See story on page 6."  Another example of use: Selwyn Cudjoe recently wrote a two-part column published over two days; why not include links at the bottom/top of each part to the other part?  Or if a columnist, like Kevin Baldeosingh or John Spence, refers to some external research (as they've both done in the current single-sex education discussion), why not include a link to it?
• The Letters to the Editor have now been moved to a new website, trinivoices.com.  No notice of this was given when the website was launched. I poked the TRINIVOICES link by accident and discovered it.  However, they also disabled right-click use on this website, so all the associated user-friendliness issues apply. Also, they don't always publish the day's letters on time, and the text/formatting used seem to suggest that the website was built by a very inexperienced designer/programmer.  Why launch a revamped main website and then shuttle the letters - the main link to your customers - to another website that isn't ready for viewing?
• Thankfully, if you choose to browse trinivoices.com, you don't have to sign-up to view the letters. However, if they decide to enforce viewer registration, I hope they remove the mandatory field for a telephone number - why do you need my phone number?  Too many websites ask me to sign-up for access and then demand personal data that they clearly don't need. You barely have money to produce a decent website - so why do you think you'll be making costly overseas phone calls to me?  Further, you ask folks to submit personal data but don't publish your privacy policy clearly on the website (like the Guardian) - this is a no-no in today's expectations for IT security.
• In their launch article, they claimed to be better than their competitors. False advertising, methinks. I can't click on an article's author's name to get all the articles written by them (as I can do in the Guardian). They haven't embedded Web 2.0 tools, e.g. buzz, digg, facebook, twitter. They claimed that the new website would facilitate up-to-the-minute reporting, rather than publish overnight; yet, I learnt of the Siparia fire from strangers on facebook hours before it appeared on the Express website.  That scrolling banner of headlines at the top of each webpage is useless: I can't click on any of the scrolling text, so it's just wasteful text and scripts that are downloaded with each page and ties up bandwidth.
• They have other formatting issues.  E.g., if the headline is split in two, then you get things like: "Speedy Justice... Magistrate promises".
• Many times, especially in financial stories, they omit the associated tables/graphs/figures that are referred to in the text.  Or they fail to format tables properly, so data won't be aligned with their headings. Or you get stuff like the Box 1 example here.
• I've long stopped using their website's search tool.  I use Google's Advanced search, where I can focus it on trinidadexpress.com.
• Their Business Express homepage is only accessible via their main website homepage. Why doesn't it appear as a sublink on the left-side or in the new Sections banner at the top of each page?
• Have they stopped producing a women's magazine? It seems so, since it's disappeared from the new website.
• As I've written elsewhere on this blog, the Express - and other websites - have used articles from other websites or non-staff writers without clear attribution.  I'm wondering if they observe copyright rules.