The Voice Newspaper website review

In today’s review I want to somewhat adopt a review style a little bit different from the previous website reviews., rather than the usual meandering style of analysing the, Layout and Design, Navigation, Markup etc, I’ll just go straight for the kill and just focus on the good, the bad and the ugly of the website under review.

So let’s get straight into it then

Overview

Unlike few of the websites that I have reviewed so far, The Voice web site has many good features about it, the web designers did take advantage of the Joomla CMS’s features and extensions like Jom Comment, SH404SEF for Search Engine Friendly URLs. The website seems to run on Joomla 1.1x which is little bit dated at  this point in time, my advice, “try Joomla 1.5” it has some rather nice features and a little bit more secure and the amount of extensions is unlimited.

Pros (The Good)

1. Regular update schedule, the updates in the website are like clock work, the online edition of the newspaper is updated weekly, very much in sync with the paper edition unlike the sporadic updates that characterizes the Mmegi website.
2. Fascinating news stories and the reporting is light-hearted, making it easy and enjoyable to read the online newspaper.
3. The comment facility is a rocker, the first online newspaper in Botswana to allow commenting on the news stories. Other newspapers, should copy that and get their readership engaged on some healthy debate.

Cons (The not so Good)

1. The Contact Us page can be better, as it is at the moment, it uses the bare functionality of the Joomla Contact component.
2. The profile page could be better, I registered thinking that by registering I would be getting “extra” facilities, like profile customization, Private Messaging etc but actually, registering is not worth it, you neither lose nor gain any extra functionality from the website by doing so. You can always try Joomla’s Community Builder to enhance the user profiles.
3. In the contact us page, The Voice guys claim to respond to queries within 24 hours but I have since written to them through their contact page, it’s been more than 72 hours now without a response.
4. Some pages are just way too long, especially those with multiple stories bundled together onto a single page. Paginating the long pages into multiple pages including the comments, would greatly enhance the browsing experience.

Verdict and Recommendations

It looks like the guys at ebotss know their stuff. However, as we all know, every good thing can always become better and anything else that is better can always be perfected. For this website

• Implement an Archived Listing of previous stories and news articles, at the moment the news portal is like a black hole, if the story disappears, it’s gone; no how to find and retrieve it.
• Break news articles in each news category into separate pages i.e. instead of having all Business News chunked into a url like http://www.thevoicebw.com/index.php/Business/Business.html it wil be much better if each story under business category had its own story. This is because, every week each category will have different stories, so if I link to http://www.thevoicebw.com/index.php/Business/Business.html this week, the following week that particular link will be pretty much irrelevant because the story would have been replaced with new stories.
• Have comments enabled on a per story basis rather than per category basis, where you have to scroll all the way through news stories in the, say, Business category before you can comment on one particular story you were interested in.
• Fix the Live Search at the top of the page. I tried using it but all I got were PHP errors as shown in the screenshot.
  
• Do away with the limit of the number of characters that can be typed in the Live Search Box as well, when testing this, I could only type in 20 characters.

Otherwise, the website is a breath of fresh air in many respects, it in many cases resemble the UK’s The Sun website but without the annoying advertising and embedded flash.

Till next time, but do feel free to leave a comment below.