CNBC relaunched its website a few days ago after being offline for six months due the expiration of its deal with Microsoft. Here is a quick look at the Good, the Bad and the Ugly on the redesigned site.
The Good
(1) According to Techcrunch, the site will have between three and eight hours of fresh video content available each day. A web show called “Market in a Minute” will summarize market happenings twice per hour. Sounds good.
(2) Most CNBC anchors appear to have their own blogs on the site that are being updated nearly every day (see Phil LeBeau’s blog here). You can search for tags, sectors and companies across blogs. This makes it easy to access all blog entries that mention, say, Microsoft.
(3) CNBC Plus will allow users to watch live CNBC TV content from their computers for $9.99 a month. That is not that interesting to me, but for business users this might be a good option.
(4) You can easily save/submit CNBC content to Digg and del.icio.us (see right). I’m not sure the content here lends itself to those sites, but it is worth a try.
The Bad
(1) The design of the site feels heavy and, well, old. The whole thing has that Microsoft/MSNBC.com feel to it. The site is also very slow.
(2) Given the video focus, it is disappointing that the only option is to play Windows Media Player versions of the videos. If you are only going to offer one video option, it seems like it should be Flash given the success of YouTube and others with that format.
(3) There is no way to comment on staff blog entries (or any other site content), although they do have a weird feature where they invite you to sent them comments via regular email. As far as I can tell there isn’t any really any user generated content on the site.
(4) I don’t see anything in the company profile area (Microsoft example) that would cause people to switch from sites like Yahoo Finance (example) and Google Finance (example).
The Ugly
(1) The search is completely broken. You can see the results for a sitewide search for “Autozone” on the right (which is that there are nor results). This despite the fact that there is clearly an Autozone story on the site homepage. Searches for Microsoft also produced no results.
(2) The Video section has a promising Most Viewed feature that presumably allows you to access the most popular videos. Unfortunately, when you click on this link it says there are no results. So I guess that is broken as well.
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