Politics Home Index launches “Bloomberg for Politics”
The new website “Politics Home” has come online this morning, with a website which is probably best described as a “window onto current political affairs”. Here is a screenshot of the initial web page.
Key Features
The site will not be producing a lot of content itself - rather it will be mainly providing feeds of others’ headlines, with daily surveys and numerical analysis from a “panel of political insiders” (which includes - among others - Iain Dale and Anthony Barnett).
On a quick evaluation, we have:
- A “news wire” of blog headlines.
- A panel of current stories, with a nifty sliding-panel arrangement to index different reports of each story (it takes a bit of getting used to).
- A guide to the events today in the broadcast and printed media, with images of newspaper front pages.
- Categorised news and comment by party, and also by business / culture / science / sport.
- A wire of latest political video.
- An index to online comment and analysis.
- And then a look at the news through a series of “numerical lenses”, ranging from analysis based on the “panel” to a count of column inches for different press stories,
- At first glance, there seem to be quite good archive facilities.
Problems - Nothing Serious
There are also a couple of technical glitches, but I would expect these to be fixed quickly.
Wrapping-Up
I can see the site becoming a good place to find stories, and that many people may use it as their “home page”.
Although I did a small job for PHI back at the turn of the year, I have not seen the final design until now (except for the mockup that was revealed via a comment on Dizzy’s blog back in February) - so I will be doing a more detailed assessment just before lunchtime today.
It feels like quite a “heavy” front page - but I will look at that in more detail later on this morning.
Interestingly, there are no significant web 2.0 features (as far as I can tell) - not even the ability to comment on stories.
Go and have a look, and let me know what you think.
Tags: politics home index, politics home, the green box, stefan shakespeare
Fellow ex-DoughtyStreet man Donal Blaney has a write-up also. He points out a few organisational issues. I add to that some points on accessbility and DDA compliance, which appears to have been given no attention whatsoever. There’s also a lot of JavaScript sitting behind it all, which causes obvious problems and issues.
The very basic concept appears to be good enough, if not a little insider-ish, but I can’t help but feel that when it comes to delivery and distribution they just haven’t got a clue.