When Budi Putra was hired by The Jakarta Post as the CEO to run its digital venture earlier this year, he implemented a series of changes that allowed the newspaper’s website to run independently of the newspaper, sharing only the name and some stories. He wanted to push more feature sections that can stand on their own rather than being part of the main news website. The first of those is the travel channel which has now gone into live beta with a look that is becoming very familiar across the web.
More and more websites are focusing on visuals, especially photographs and images to draw attention to content and The Jakarta Post isn’t immune to the trend. Being a travel site, it would actually be a surprise if it wasn’t relying heavily on photos. At the moment, the website is far from finished and it was pushed live perhaps to gauge opinion and input from visitors.
We’ve been informed that the current website for The Jakarta Post is not the main site for The Jakarta Post Digital and this might explain the lack of linkage to the travel site. In fact, the future site of Jakarta Post Digital may well be at jakpost.com, an address which is currently being redirected to the travel site.
Being a travel guide, it’s not that crucial in many cases to have the very latest news, hence the emphasis on destinations, accommodations, activities, and visually arresting images to draw people into the stories, all of which were published by the newspaper at some point in the last few years, including new ones. It would certainly be useful if they can take a look at those older stories and provide them with an update that reflects the current condition or situation if necessary.
While the site already contains many entries with sharp, colorful, and vibrant photos, much of it feels rather barren. By no means I’m suggesting that it should be filled with links, banner ads, and other potentially distracting elements, but the hard column split between the images and the text instills a deep sense of disconnect as if they represent two different stories.
With such rich photography and a deemphasis on recency, a magazine approach would perhaps be more suited for this sort of publication, something that integrates the images with the text to improve the unity of the stories and enhances the emotion that the stories try to evoke from the readers.
Ben Brooks of The Brooks Review took a look at a number of popular news websites and assessed their readability. Some points may be well worth considering when looking at Jakarta Post Travel or indeed, its future siblings.
