I hate the ‘ThisIs’ series of websites. I hate the name. I hate the designs. Urg urg urg. Many of these local sites would benefit greatly from just having all the rubbish whipped out and replaced with a simple publishing platform that everyone in the newsroom could operate. That’s what we’re doing at Whitireia, and that’s what should be happening pretty much everywhere.

And for heaven’s sake, stop calling them ‘This Is’. It’s annoying. Thisishullandeastriding.co.uk?! What a jumble. What on earth is wrong with just HullDailyMail.co.uk?

Anyway, Dan Ionescu, my successor on The Linc, has written a brilliant critique about the ThisIsLincolnshire website. Although it uses Lincolnshire as the example, the comments could be applied to pretty much all of the ‘ThisIs’ sites. Apart from maybe Hull, which is getting better, but their video content is still pretty shoddy. What is the point of a video clip that just films the newspaper pages…? Go and take a look. It’s getting better though, so hats off to the Hull Daily Mail.

Anyway, Dan’s advice is really terrific. The most insightful nugget for me is this:

* Asking users to make the page their home page (top, left) is quite 90s style, taking in consideration that Echo offers RSS feeds. They should be placed somewhere higher on the page, with a bigger emphasis. Also, Echo does not offer full RSS feeds, but does it in the old school BBC style, with snippets, redirecting to the article’s page. Wrong decision, as nowadays RSS feeds can be monetised easily, and their visitor stats can be effortlessly monitored;

And…

* Geotagging, for a more comprehensive local reporting, together with interactive maps and graphs.