Chhenapoda.com

When I moved in to the Capital city with my Daddy for better education, to our new government quarters I had interesting encounters with many city phenomena. One of them was NewsPapers. The first Newspaper I have ever read was The Samaja. It is, in my honest opinion, the most credible informer of Odiyas till date. I have a deep respect for its founder – Utkalamani Gopabandhu Das. Well my early childhood was spent running around the Memoirs of Gopabandhu and his five friend’s (the Pancha Sakha) “Bana Vidyalaya” at “Bakula Bana” in Sakhigopal. Hence I have a very strong bonding with this particular news paper.

Ever since I moved out of Odisha and lost touch with my mother tongue I have always comeback to thesamaja.com to read a bit of Odiya and stay abreast of happenings in my state. I never bothered to go and check out other news paper online. You may say I am biased but that comes with deep emotional bonds I just cannot shoo away.

But the current state of the site thesamaja.com makes me sad. It way too poor to be Odisha’s most popular online news site. The technology that drives the site is bloody pre-historic. The Babus who manage the site are most probably computer illiterate. Incompetence is a trait among Odiyas that would be hard to do away with for some more generations to come. Being the best in the field you need to set standards for young minds to idolize. That breeds entrepreneurs. That is what promotes healthy competition. Our leaders have always lacked that ability, be they in politics or in Media and Journalism.

If you look at News and publishing houses around the world you would see they are not just leaders in Journalism they are pioneers of Technology as well. They know how to make it easier for people to access News. They know how to make the news more presentable. They know how to make big profits out of all this as well.
The days of print Media is numbered now. You cannot stick to the sinking ship for ever, even though it means a lot to you. You have to move on.

I am presenting below a Case study of mammoth pitfalls on thesamaja.com that literally pisses of a visitor and makes sure he never bothers to return to the website again. I will mostly be discussing design and technology issues associated with the website. I am listing them pointwise as they appear to me on 14th August, 2011 at 2:50 PM.

The Samaja Logo

Good logo, Popular but very poorly presented.

How can people be so short sighted. The most prominent element on a webpage is the company’s logo. Here is the logo as they are using on the website. See the quality of the graphic? It looks like some 4th standard kid who got it scanned from the newspaper in poor resolution and used it for his assignment. He would get a D for this quality of work.
The fonts are all hazy and the borders are faded. The name of its founder is not visible. Did the Editor order that? You must remember that you sell because of his name (to a significant extent) so does it not make sense to make it prominent.

Will someone care to explain if “Pratisthta – Utkalamani Gopandhu Das” is a part of the logo or not? If yes what the fuck is it doing in a separate image?

Solution : Get the damn logo traced and converted to a scalable vector. Re develop it if required. Do try to look antique.
Out the “pratisthata” line in the logo as well. If its supposed to be a part of the logo – else its fine. But in either case it should be bloody readable.

here is the next part of this series – Usability Issues with thesamaja.com