When Ajax to the tram hies … And an island never cries :)
I found out from Iulian Comanescu that the newspaper Romania Libera relaunched their site.
A few small remarks plus, in my opinion, a very important one.
The small ones:
1. Some RSS would have been extremely useful. Think Web 2.0!
2. Why does the general belief that the “Advertising” section must have a place in the menu still exist? I mean, how many times does it happen for a big corporation or advertising agency to pop up and say “I saw on your webpage that you also sell advertising space. We would have never guessed that.”
3. What is the use of a clock in the header of the page? To show exactly the time the computer also shows? At least if it would have shown the time of Bucharest for the ones abroad, for instance.
Besides these remarks, everything is ok. Except my big dissatisfaction.
This site is a very clear example how to not use the AJAX for the sake of AJAX. If you look at the URLs you will see they don’t change at all. Index.php remains like that all the time. Which is extremely bad for the search engines which will see exactly one page. Apparently, until now, 15-20 percents of the visitors came from the search engines. From now on only the ones looking for “Romania Libera” will find a link to the page.
More, it is a completely not usable thing, affecting all users. What should I do if I want to save some articles to read later? How do I save the URLs? Of course, there might be some appended parameters when sending the articles by email, but this facility was not working at the time I checked it. So it was impossible for me to figure it out.
And what do I do if I want to link an article from RL to another site, for instance?
I think they did it to avoid certain websites that merge content, but I think it was a completely counter-productive choice. To try to turn into a totally isolated island in this fluid online world proves a profound misundersanding of the way value and web content are created and propagated.
PS. And since it is all about faulty misunderstandings of the way things on the Internet work, here’s a very cool post written by Vladimir about a workshop at Biz Days. Completely hilarious, you almost wonder if that workshop does not deserve all the money in times when Hollywood does not produce good comedies anymore.