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by Sarah Cupitt
The Western Weekender has a solid online presence; its website acts as the lead magnet for all its news stories, links to its social media and is available in 46 languages, easily adjustable from the top bar on the site. The site follows the brand guidelines and encourages the user to sign up with a pop-up subscribe box and read former print editions online. Utilising feature photos for articles on the homepage is a standard but essential requirement; the site does a decent job at design considering its purpose is to upload stories to share via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and direct traffic to the articles on the website.
As far as web design and user experience go, the website is unnecessarily complex for readers to navigate, and most of the visuals of the website consist of cluttered sponsored ads, which makes the site seem less credible as a news source. In addition, the home page lacks consistent layout and structure, with news topics listed down the page in no particular order, organised into topics and not date, not including the five articles at the top of the page. Even with those five featured articles, only the most recent one shows who wrote it and when; the other four show the article titles.
Considering how users want information as quickly as possible in today's media industry, it's a slight concern about how the site prioritises different media topics. For example, the top of the website has two rows of page buttons for users to click and view; none have drop-down menus, which could be a simple fix to reduce clutter on the site and organise content for its readers. Another idea would be to focus on niche topics that perform well on The Western Weekender, such as local news, sports, travel and entertainment and then have subcategories as needed. For example, there is the opportunity to combine the Directory, Partnerships, and Special Features. Job opportunities and horoscopes are also linked on the bottom header of the site, separated from the rest of the topic pages.
Ultimately for a local newspaper, simple tweaks would improve the user experience and potentially draw in subscribers who are scared away by the organisation's lack of organisation across the site, reflecting the feel of the publication. In addition, team members could improve SEO in the articles themselves as not all stories with keywords in titles show up in the websites search results, e.g. council. While the site runs smoothly and has only minor issues that an editor could quickly amend, the execution overall lacks - especially a publication that's been around before digital journalism.
Upon close reflection, you can also notice draft pages that have been published and not updated. For the about us page, the paper gives context about its 30 years of history. It says, "The Western Weekender is a local, independent publication that is delivered to homes and businesses across the Penrith Local Government Area. (Explainer: What is the Penrith Local Government Area?)". Rather than hyperlink Penrith LGA, the page seems unfinished, like many other pages with notes meant for the audience, but it looks like it's meant for the editors.
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