Big Media - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

In a week that that saw a rally in global stock markets and is seeing some of the best Black Friday deals in recent memory, it seems like the world has been able to recapture some sense of normalcy.

Here's the news that caught my attention this week.

Despite being pretty advanced online, The Guardian's mobile site is well behind the times, and the newspaper has now hired a consultant to improve its mobile strategy.

The mobile edition doesn't match up to the web version and, with this in mind, I've been taking a closer look at the Guardian's and some other newspaper's mobile sites...

Bloomberg.com published an interesting article last Friday that highlights just how competitive it's getting in the newspaper world as newspapers struggle to not only survive the woes of their industry, but struggle to survive a tough economic environment.

According to a study recently released by Yahoo, UK internet users are suffering from information overload.

As reported by the Association of Online Publishers UK, the study, which is entitled "Return on Attention," found that 70% of users "admitted to spending hours sifting through unwanted or irrelevant information."

Launched last week, Sky Shopping is a price comparison site displaying products from retailers including M&S, John Lewis and Comet.

There are already plenty of shopping comparison sites out there, so is this one any different?

ITV has been adding more video content to its mobile service recently, as well as promoting it between TV programmes.

With this in mind, I decided to take a look at the site and compare it with the BBC's offering, which was upgraded earlier this year...

The Financial Times began rolling out changes to its website earlier this week, with a new look and very pink homepage being the first major update.  

This is the first stage of an ongoing redesign process and so far it looks like a big improvement. I've taken a closer look at the changes...

I spend a lot of time on newspaper and other publishers' sites, and am often amazed at how bad their site search functions can be.

A lot of sites have been redesigned over the past year or so, and have improved a lot, but their search functions can still be patchy.

Here are a few thoughts on how they could be improved...

Yahoo has had a chip on its shoulder about search, aka ‘Google’,  for years. The brand name synonymous with search isn’t Yahoo. Big deal.

Obviously it is a very big deal for Jerry Yang, but in focusing on the battle for ‘search’ Yahoo has forgotten about what really matters: advertisers.

How should a website handle errors? What kind of information and messages should be presented to the user? And will a one-size fits all approach do the job?

Our own 404 page is pretty lame, so we’ve been thinking about the various ways in which we can improve things, as part of our year-long project to provide you with a glorious new E-consultancy website (due in early-2009).

I have also analysed the 404 pages of 10 of the most popular news sites, to see how other publishers are faring.