The Times Online; online newspaper use
...her newspapers in the U.K. like the Sun, News of the World and the Sunday Times. The new owner is, among other things, responsible for the recent change in format of the Times and of course for the Times to go online. This was a result of the huge technological changes in the beginning of the 1990’s. Suddenly everyone had access to the Internet; the logical next step was for the Times to go online as well. With this step to the information highway a range of possibilities opened up. No longer was the Times a newspaper, now it was also a source of information and entertainment. The Times Online has the options to search the archive of the newspaper on relevant articles up to seven days for free, and even older articles for a small fee. Besides that the website contains a section with articles exclusively published on the net. And if you just want to read the newspaper, you can download a digital version of the printed newspaper up until seven days before the current date. As you can imagine this transition was not just fun. A whole new audience was up for grabs, now they had to find out how. Research shows that over 85% of the average Internet user is male. Meaning that the attraction of a male audience would be far more feasible, than a female audience. Therefore, as you can see from the layout and especially the ‘women’ section, it is more focussed on the female Internet user than the male user. The layout implies that women need their own section; they are special enough to have one, while the male audience has to make do with the ‘regular’ articles. Besides this obvious difference between male and female, there is one other aspect that catches the eye: the almost simplistic form of the website. The headings are in different colour so as to stand out from the background and on the left side of the page a bar with simple keywords leading to different sections of the news helps the reader to find what they are looking for. Add to that the total lack of colour except for the top of the page, the info bar and the pictures and you have an easily accessible website. I believe this has been done for a reason. Although Internet has been around for a while, there are still loads of people who don’t know how to use it. Especially older people have trouble with ‘new technology’. The layout of this page is constructed in such a way that even the ‘slowest’ Internet user can find its way around this page. Another example of the efficiency of this page, are the articles that are partially shown on the homepage. They are the top-stories from different sections of the page, carefully selected as to appeal to as many readers as possible. By not showing the entire article the reader can get a quick idea of what the article entails and then decide whether he/she wants to read the full stor...