Jan 10 2007
Guernsey Press Online Reader
I found out today that the Guernsey Press is testing an online edition of the newspaper. I don’t mean a new version of thisisguernsey.com, but an online reader for the actual print paper. Whilst this, at first glance, seems to be a move in the right direction they really need to look at the way they’re doing it.
Firstly, it seems that it will only be available to Internet Explorer users. I presume they’re going to be using some proprietory ActiveX control for viewing the paper. This is a really bad move if you ask me, whilst IE 7 is an improvement in past version it still falls short of the mark and many people prefer alternative browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konquerer).
Secondly, it seems that they’re planning on charging £10/month for the service. Which, if you exclude Sundays, works out at about 36p per day. This is only 4p less than the physical paper costs. Quite how they can justify this price when they don’t have to cover the costs of the physical paper (raw materials, distribution, machinery, etc.) is beyond me.
Thirdly, it isn’t very well written. On the login page, every time a key is press, when the password box has focus, a javascript funtion is called to see if the enter button is pressed. This is totally redundant as any half decent browser will provide this functionality for free. If that is how the login page is written I dread to think what the rest of the site is like. I have another reason for concern about the programming of the site but I need to contact the developers before I make it public.
