In this discussion I am going to focus on three most visited Online News Portals:
BBC Online
Al Jazeera English
Tahelka.com
Must Head/Site Banner:
Tehelka has a traditional top banner holding the must head of the Site Title. In Al Jazeera the must head is slightly different, a square shaped image of Al-Jazeera’s logo placed at the left side of the page. In BBC the must head is almost like a traditional one but as it holds the BBC logo, it also contains some important features search box, Current date and time. As BBC’s page layout is a bit different than any traditional website, containing some useful components for using the site and some add-on for its features like Display Options, Accessibility help, Access keys help, Mobile, Make this my Homepage, Take the tour.
Site Navigation:
Tehelka.com has a horizontal navigation bar with all of its categories where Al Jazeera has left sided side-navigation link sets. In BBC no classic example of Navigation bar is found. Instead of it a navigation bar like component is found where it has three buttons titled ‘Add more to this page’, ‘Set your location’ and ‘Reset Homepage’. As we know BBC has an interactive home page layout, where these three buttons help a user to customize the home page content according to his/her own interest.
Page Layout
In page layout also Tehelka.com is a bit traditional, having a major three column page layout. In left column it contains some of Tehelka’s important sections like Newsletter, Election-Update, Investigative News, links of Content by columnists. In the right column it has daily top stories, subscription offer and some advertisements (including Google Adsense). In the innermost body column it contains the top and exclusive stories, News of various sections and a few banner ads.
Al Jazeera also having a tree column layout having basic page navigation at the left most column, special link to different news sections and services at the right most one and its main body column it contains the top stories and lead news of different sections.
But from this extent BBC has an extraordinary page layout with movable page contents. In BBC page the only fixed item is TOP NEWS STORY at the top of the page. Except it all the news sections in different boxes are movable. It is also possible to customize how many section boxes will be visible in every site visit, and customize the content featuring in the section boxes through every box’s control button and Edit option.
Contact Option
Contact Option is available in all the news sites.
RSS Feed
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) Service is available in all three news sites.
Multimedia Facilities
Tehelka.com presents news only via text and still images. No use of video, streaming video or audio podcasting has been found in this site.
In BBC Most of the news is covered through text and still images. But online streaming Radio, Podcast and streaming video option is also available in BBC.
In Al Jazeera also have a wide range use of text and still images. But they also provide video news bulletin via YouTube streaming video technology and Live Station live TV broadcasting technology.
Use of Ad-gadget Adsense
In both Tehelka.com and Al Jazeera, Adsense service is used in many pages as advertisement provider. But in BBC no Adsense Content is found.
Feedback
In Tehelka, no feedback feature is offered. But in Al Jazeera all the news has feedback option for the online reader’s. BBC also offers this feedback option.
Related News Feature
In BBC and Al Jazeera, when a visitor visits a news, other news having any sort of relation with the current one also comes in the notice in a side box with related topic title.
But Tehelka does not provide this service in their site.
Sharing Option
Sharing the article with most common social networking sites and content sharing sites like dig.com, facebook.com StumbleUpon.com, and reddit.com is available in both BBC and Al Jazeera. Tehelka.com does not offer this sharing facility.
Marquee Content
No marquee content is available in these three sites with top story’s headline.
Language support
Multilingual support is available in BBC only. Tehelka is only in English. Al Jajeera is mainly in Arabic having a second version in English.
Search
Searching option using keywords is available in all three news sites.