Rant

Irish Times mistake

By gmurran ⋅ July 17, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Have you tried to visit Ireland.com in the past few weeks? Seemingly without warning the Irish times website the 40th most visited web site in Ireland according to Alexa ratings changed its domain and in the process every link, bookmark, browser landing page was broken.

The paper has been full of opinion on the new design with allot of comments from a non web savy readership being. People do not like the portal style information overload nature of the new design. Two things in particular have shocked me most

The total disregard for the readers allot of people have bookmarked certain sections of the site. These are now buried and hard to find. This might be good for the advertising but not for the users.
The SEO implications of changing from a domain that has seen 5 revisions and been online since: 30-Sep-1997 has been ignored. You now go to some strange tourist orientated site. This should leave someone fired.

Amazingly the traffic has actually shot up, but page views are down for the site, so I’m thinking that the thinking behind the move is that a tourism site may generate more hits outside Ireland than a national newspaper site does within. A quick
whois lookup shows that the ownership has not changed so it seems like an odd move.

The new site itself has been well develop. the site is written using web standards and attempt to incorporate the best elements of the BBC, New York Times and theGuardian.