Content is king! You have to provide them with content that they want in order to get people to come to your site. However, you should be particularly careful in how you integrate it with the community features of your site. Content should be interwoven with community features to lend a coherent integrated experience for the user. For example, Powazek discusses Salon’s failings as of 2002 at providing an integrated experience when using the site. He notes that clicking on a small community link would lead to a community menu with various topics, not to the thread related to the community. Furthermore, the community element of the site did not have the same look as the content areas resulting in a disjointed user experience where the user felt their contributions were unimportant. .
Salon has done a lot to rectify this in the past four years although the link to the community function is still relatively hidden among text (Click the Post a letter button). Its community has the same look as the content and is integrated in a horizontal fashion with the content linking to the relevant community topic thread. However, Salon still breaks one cardinal rule: The post button only takes two clicks to get to. The result of this may be lower quality postings as it encourages impulsive comments that may not have been thought through, especially since posters are not required to register.
The fray, the community tied to Slate, is in many ways reminiscent of the 2002 Salon community. When you click on the community feature it takes you to correct directory but not necessarily to the correct thread for discussing an article. Furthermore, the interface is blocky and does not mirror the content section of the site at all. The site only shows one posting and to read replies in the same thread one must repeatedly click on the link to the reply and let the page reload. Still Slate manages to do a few things that Salon does not. First, it explicitly elicits a reply from it’s users by asking “What did you think of this article?” This is a good attempt to relate to readers on a human level and may pay off judging by how active the threads are. Second, it asks its readers to register. This may go a long way to preventing spam on the site.
So if we use Powazek’s standards for judging a site neither Salon or Slate got it entirely right. An ideal format would the integrated content and community design of Salon with the more structured posting process of Slate. Posting could be made more difficult for both sites by burying the post button a little further down in the articles. Overall I’m going to have to say that I personally prefer Salon’s system if simply because I’m a sucker for pretty, easy to use design.
