Many features of the 2004 election CNN site are developed in Flash. It probably cost a few arms and legs (most of our clients could not afford the price tag), but the overall feeling of quality struck me as a sea change in what can be done on the web.
None of what they did is extremely difficult. I could probably do it all myself, given three of four months of spare time, and none of the features are groundbreaking. But what makes it interesting is the very high overall feeling of quality: things work well, smoothly, neatly. The match between information (data that is available to the visitor), interaction (how that data is being shown, how you can modify it, etc.), and visuals (things are displayed clearly, and look reasonably good).
In my view, CNN had the best election site. The other interesting contender was, I think, MSNBC. However, it suffered from major flaws which made it significantly less powerful than the CNN site.
The MSNBC election results pages didn’t work very well and were awfully slow. The freshness of the information was difficult to assess, and maps often showed information that was different from the tables (also a problem with CNN, but CNN did claim that the maps were more editorial work, with an actual analysis made). I wanted to watch incumbent congressman Brown (Dem, 13th district of Ohio), and that required a bookmark. Last, but not least, the look and feel was not very clean.
Strangely enough, MSNBC’s Horserace page was quite daring and powerful (although quite processor-intensive and more jumpy than the CNN pages, with its blocks growing on mouse over). But during election night, nothing so sophisticated or exciting was used. (By the way, the information on the Horserace page is only partially outdated: the electoral votes map was last updated on Nov 3, but the video clips are not dated. Nasty feeling of something half-way baked, if you ask me.)
I do not know what the results of that work was: having such a high quality site probably allowed CNN to gain many short-term visitors, and possibly a few long-term ones, as well as paying customers (for the video clips). It also certainly cost them very much, and I am not sure that the balance is in CNN’s favor.
Early electoral information is already being gathered by a pool of media outlets who can’t afford it on their own (the now-famous exit polls, the 2004 version of “Dewey defeats Truman”). But would there be a possibility for web sites to effectively pool resources for such big events? And which resources would that be, considering that sites must imperatively brand the user experience?
US elections: Flash gives CNN an edge
Many features of the 2004 election CNN site are developed in Flash. It probably cost a few arms and legs (most of our clients could not afford the price tag), but the overall feeling of quality struck me as a sea change in what can be done on the web.
None of what they did is extremely difficult. I could probably do it all myself, given three of four months of spare time, and none of the features are groundbreaking. But what makes it interesting is the very high overall feeling of quality: things work well, smoothly, neatly. The match between information (data that is available to the visitor), interaction (how that data is being shown, how you can modify it, etc.), and visuals (things are displayed clearly, and look reasonably good).
In my view, CNN had the best election site. The other interesting contender was, I think, MSNBC. However, it suffered from major flaws which made it significantly less powerful than the CNN site.
The MSNBC election results pages didn’t work very well and were awfully slow. The freshness of the information was difficult to assess, and maps often showed information that was different from the tables (also a problem with CNN, but CNN did claim that the maps were more editorial work, with an actual analysis made). I wanted to watch incumbent congressman Brown (Dem, 13th district of Ohio), and that required a bookmark. Last, but not least, the look and feel was not very clean.
Strangely enough, MSNBC’s Horserace page was quite daring and powerful (although quite processor-intensive and more jumpy than the CNN pages, with its blocks growing on mouse over). But during election night, nothing so sophisticated or exciting was used. (By the way, the information on the Horserace page is only partially outdated: the electoral votes map was last updated on Nov 3, but the video clips are not dated. Nasty feeling of something half-way baked, if you ask me.)
I do not know what the results of that work was: having such a high quality site probably allowed CNN to gain many short-term visitors, and possibly a few long-term ones, as well as paying customers (for the video clips). It also certainly cost them very much, and I am not sure that the balance is in CNN’s favor.
Early electoral information is already being gathered by a pool of media outlets who can’t afford it on their own (the now-famous exit polls, the 2004 version of “Dewey defeats Truman”). But would there be a possibility for web sites to effectively pool resources for such big events? And which resources would that be, considering that sites must imperatively brand the user experience?