Good Morning Sir,
Here is my analysis of Mediate for your consideration. The website is in good standing, however there are a couple things that could be better. Please see below. Thanks.
Brian Grant — 3060 Digital Media Consultant — Dewey, Cheatem & Howe, LLC.
Introduction — Mediaite
Mediaite is a website I visit frequently. I rarely visit the main page as I normally go to their site through a Facebook link. The site is a blog for news with a dash of arts and entertainment content. Articles are usually comprised of blog posts describing a video or news article. This is a breakdown of the site and how it conforms with how we know good website should be.
Navigation
When you first arrive to Mediate homepage, you will see it is chock full of content. Mediaite is apart of the Abrams Media Network which include other sites like The Braiser – a food blog site, Sportsgrid – a, you guessed it, sports blog site, Styleite for style, and another favorite site of mine The Mary Sue, which covers scifi, tv, comics, and basically anything nerdy. Those sites are listed at the header of the site, along with the Mediaite logo.
All of their current news is posted here along with links to the various categories their articles are broken up into – TV, Online, Print, Rankings, Columns, Jobs. Much like a real newspaper they seem to have many advertising site. When you click on the article most likely you’ll have advertisements on the borders. Often for other website but actual product advertisement does show up on the right border as you scroll down. Also embedded videos will have advertisements before the article video plays
The footer borders have promoted stories not associated with Mediaite. The right border has more stories from medite and a few promoted sites from around the web. Most are the list/click bait kind.
Website Layout
The color of the site is a whitish-beige color and the logo is red I think the color is ugly, but at the same time it’s not very distracting either. The web pages have a lot going on without having a lot going on. All the ads that are not embedded with their videos are static and non moving so while they have quite a few adds, it’s not totally distracting you from the article at hand. I also often times find myself hitting those click bait articles with racy pictures of celebrities or the outrageous headline. Mediaite also helped me find one of my other favorite websites The Mary Sue, though I’m not as active on there.
Mediate has a lot on consistency. On each page, the top header has links to sister sites, right below it has links to related mediaite articles, below it you have a picture ad, right below it you have the main site navigation links and then you get to the article. On the left side there’s usually nothing it has tools where you can share the article on various social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and Reddit.
What I like most about the site is that all articles have a comments section which is usually very active. with conversations. Many of those conversations devolve into insults and big debates The comments section use a program called Disqus, something I’ve seen on other sites as well. It makes having conversations regarding the article easy as it sends you email updates when someone liked your comment or replied. You can also go to Disqus main site to pull up conversations you’re apart of.
Every article listed on mediaite had a author listed and when you click on the author’s name it takes you to a list of all of their published material. Though there are no biographies of the author The authors have a small text link where you can follow them on Twitter. On a website that has many pictures and advertisements it can be easy to overlook this link unless you’re looking for it specifically.
Writing Style
Writing style of the site is typical of news-blog sites. Posts can range from a few paragraphs to a few pages long. Articles are broken up pretty evenly a paragraph is usually a few pages long. The writing can fluctuate between a traditional “hard-facts” news style where they just provide the information, to opinion pieces about politics that are laden with pop-culture references and sometimes insults. All of course is depending on the writer and what they’re writing about.
Tone/Voice
Mediaite is not like a Gawker, which occasionally breaks (or become) the news, it makes the news a lot more accessible, offers context and commentary and is a good place to discuss the news with others. . There will always be sites like CNN, BBC, etc. that clings to traditional publishing of news – journalists in a politically correct manner, boringly presenting the news – but Mediaite is not bound by those old traditions and with way less name recognition is allowing the public to discuss topics which at times can rival the big news sites readership.
Site Organization
The site is easy to navigate. The only critique I have is there’s no about page or links to all their staff members. To maintain a site that updates several times a day by multiple authors, this seems like a disservice to them. I also found a broken “video” header link that says the domain has been inactive. A few of their pages do have video advertisements which often can be very distracting.
Conclusion
Mediate follows many of the rules to maintaining a good, popular website that will attract readers. However it’s not without it’s flaws. A couple broken links and a better author’s page is needed. One thing I’d like to point out – which I feel is instrumental to the sites success – is social media presence. Obviously it has nothing to do with how a the main website should ran, but it’s social media accounts, with their catchy headlines is the reason why the site is popular. Therefore lets not ever underestimate the power of social media. A good website will keep readers but , as Mediaite demonstrates, a social media presence and a good headline will bring em’ there.
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