News Website
Judge: Brianna Owczarzak
Places:
1st- The Collegiate: Grand Rapids Community College
Judge comments:
The Collegiate’s website is crisp, clean and visually appealing. It is updated frequently with good visuals. The website itself is user friendly and easy to navigate. One note to add: Shorten up your headlines so they don’t get cut off on landing pages.
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2nd- The Washtenaw Voice: Washtenaw Community College
Judge comments:
The main thing that separated the Washtenaw Voice from its competition was the layout of the
website. It was visual, engaging, and user-friendly. The content was updated frequently for being a student-run publication and it had great use of photos and graphics. The only suggestion I would give would be to add thumbnails to the videos in the video section to make them more appealing.
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3rd- The Lookout: Lansing Community College
Judge comments:
This school updated its website more frequently than the rest of the schools. But the layout of the website needs work. It is not inviting or making readers want to stay and click through to the next story. They are posting good content frequently and the layout should reflect this to encourage readers to stay on the site.
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Honorable Mention: The Mirror News: Henry Ford Community College
Judge comments:
The placement of articles on the home page was visual, engaging, and user-friendly. But the website itself was not updated as frequently as some of the other schools. The stories were also long and reminded me of traditional print articles. Web readers are a different audience than newspaper readers. They have short attention spans and do not want to read through long paragraphs. Writing
for digital should be different than writing for the newspaper. Keep this in mind when publishing content online. I would also like to see more categories at the top (examples: news, sports, entertainment, etc.)
