Sunday Times revamps website

Sunday Times has relaunch their site. The redesign looks great. Following the latest trend in creating wide-format sites, their website really hits the spot for me and raises the bar for local online publishers from a design point of view. The old site was in bad need of a redesign, but this makes it all worth it. I like the use of multimedia, the big square ads which I think are the most effective of all the ads spots and formats. I also like their bold rotating graphic featurette — although I hope for such a big feature it updates very frequently…ie more than once a day as is the expectation on news sites. I get the feeling there is alot more multimedia to come on this site… which is very exciting…
Strangely enough, I still don’t see any RSS feeds on the site… this has been an area where Sunday Times has missed a trick and a whole lot of traffic along with it. They also don’t seem to understand what a podcast is, calling their streaming audio download a podcast (for the record, this is a podcast). A podcast aint a podcast without RSS XML, where you can subscribe, otherwise it’s just an audio download! I’ve also noticed over the last few months increased online branding and references in their newspaper to the online site — which i think is executed really well.
So, big up to the Sunday Times. Well done to everyone at Sunday Times…. now you got to get yourself up the readership rankings and above Mail & Guardian Online. We’re watching you 😉