Competitor Analysis

For the first part of our online assessment we have been set the group task of creating a website for the Student Newspaper Canvas. Although we have all tried our hand at web design, there is a lot more to creating a news site.

The best way to start is by looking at other student newspaper sites and doing a competitor analysis to see what ones work and what ones really do not work, and the reasons for this.

I decided to do a Google search for ‘student newspaper website’ to see what the first few things to come up would be. At the top of the list was Varsity – The independent Cambridge student newspaper since 1947.

The first thing that struck me about this site is how professional it looks. It uses a very traditional Dreamweaver news site layout, not unlike that of the BBC. With a banner at the top, section buttons down the left hand side and the top stories in section boxes on the homepage.

Although it is professional looking there is nothing to flashy or complicated about the design. There is not necessarily a need for anything special to be done to the site; after all it seems to fit its purpose. But as a student site I would have expected something a little more exciting.

The second major thing I noticed was the amount of links used on the homepage. Right at the top there is a link to the paper edition and also a podcast. This further links to a place where you can subscribe to the podcast through Itunes or an RSS feed. I think this is a brilliant example of how the Internet can make something as basic as a student newspaper into something more interactive and universal. If I wanted I could subscribe to an RSS feed of all news related to Cambridge University without even paying the university a visit. This really shows how the Internet is dominating media progression.

It is very obvious even without knowing how long the website has been running that the creators have established themselves and the newspaper well into the endless possibilities of the Internet. They have built themselves a list of sponsors at the bottom of the homepage, and a reasonable amount of advertising, which is enough to keep the site and paper funded but not so much as to bombard those visiting the site.

I think Varsity is a student newspaper site, which works really well. Although the look of the site may not be the most exciting, it is traditional and professional which is the most important thing, and it obviously serves its purpose.

The second site I came across was FELIX – The student newspaper of Imperial College London. I would say without being too harsh that this site from first impression is completely the opposite of Varsity, and certainly does not serve its purpose at all.

My first impression was ‘boring’. There is simply nothing exciting to look at. A basic banner, no images and a bunch of boxes laid out in what appears to be an unorganised fashion on the homepage, which include the first few lines of a story and a read more link. But that is just what it looks like at the first glance.

Further investigation lead me to discover that my first impressions were not wrong. This site fails to recognise the potential of the Internet. There are a few links at the bottom of the homepage but there is where it ends. It is nothing more than the actual paper on a screen. There appears to be a real lack of organisation, and no real design. I may of course be wrong, but most sites there is at least a theme of colours, fonts or images running throughout, but here although the font remains the same, colours, and images change regularly. This factor, as not only an online student, but as a regular Internet user, who uses news sites as my main news resource, is quite alienating. It’s confusing, not easy to follow and without structure it fails to make me want to look at it any further.

I think these two examples show how the Internet can be used to its full potential to make a student newspaper site work online, and how the point of it all can be completely missed.