How IOL could beat News24

Without that much trouble, or even that much investment, www.IOL.co.za could overtake News24 as South Africa's top website.

In part, one can make this kind of claim because IOL is still the country's second largest news website – despite their best efforts to drive away users with their shoddy design and lack of online know-how.

The reason why IOL is still hanging in there, and also the reason why they could improve so much, is that they have certain fundamentals very well in place.

The fundamentals

Probably the best thing that IOL has going for it is the relatively high amount of exclusive content the site gets from the newspapers in the Independent group. This gives the site a massive edge over News24 when it comes to things like columns. (almost invariably IOL's columns are worth reading, whereas the blogs that News24 presents as columns tends to be of a much lower standard.)

As mentioned in previous posts, all the news sites have access to the same wires. So, what gives one's content the edge over an other's, is the exclusives. IOL 1 – 0 News24.

This is not to say that IOL can take it easy. Indeed, none of the local news sites have really managed to leverage their relationships with newspapers with any great success. This is of course partly due to the fact that SA newspapers tend to be reluctant to share too much content with their online partners.

Still, the growth is online, and any company that ignores this will fall behind.

Apart from their exclusive content, the other thing that counts in IOL's favour, is the fact that they have built up a substantial user base. This, and the ability to refer people to the site from their newspapers gives them a lovely platform to build from.

Why they are losing ground

The most obvious problem with IOL is that the layout and design of the site is terribly out of date. Compare for example to a site like www.guardian.co.uk .

The problem however goes much deeper than just the basic look and feel, since the whole way in which the site is constructed and laid out feels clumsy and counterintuitive. Links to IOL Sport and IOL Parenting right next to each other? And announcing this week's column by YYY, and not mentioning what the column is about? Please, these are really basic things.

Possibly worst of all, is the poor editing on the front page. As a test, visit www.iol.co.za and see how many spelling or typing errors you can spot on the front page. I've done this a few times, and the lowest score so far is 2.

Underlying all these issues, there seems to be a lack of enthusiasm and understanding for the online medium - or maybe just a lack of resources, in which case the lack of enthusiasm and understanding is located higher up in the management hierarchy.

Note: This lack of online know-how is also illustrated in the sites failure to develop its community aspects. But I wont go into that here.

What needs to be done

The good news, is that things can be fixed quite easily. A proper, from the bottom up, re-think of how the site is structured, along with a clean modern redesign will do wonders.

Add to that a few high quality web editors and some creative people to keep things fresh, and a combination of wires and quality content from the newspapers will take care of the rest.

Of course, for any of this to happen, people higher up in the Independent group will have to start taking IOL.co.za more seriously.

As always, it will come down to vision, or a lack thereof.