It’s shameless plug time: January is approaching (no, really), and with it another term of courses in the Magazine Publishing program at Ryerson University. My class (Creating Website Editorial) is offered in January and February (it’s just seven weeks long, not a big commitment but packed with useful information), and of course I’d love for you to take it, but there are lots of other excellent classes starting in January:

• The Business of Magazine Publishing with D.B. Scott
• Introduction to Magazine Design with Jayne Finn
• Magazine Writing with Margaret Webb
• Advanced Magazine Writing with David Hayes
• Magazine Copy Editing with Bernadette Kuncevicius
• Editing Service Journalism with Doug O’Neill

Just remember, if you’re thinking of taking a class, the earlier you sign up, the better – sometimes classes get cancelled because of low enrollment, and no one knows you plan to take it unless you actually register.

Shameless plug over: we’ll return to our regular programming now.

We had an interesting discussion in class last night after one student’s presentation of ew.com (the website for Entertainment Weekly – even if you’re not interested in the subject matter, it’s worth visiting just to see what maximum resources can get you). The question: when you’re ew.com and you have over 8 million UVs a month – and 80 million pageviews – with what might as well be infinite content online (seriously, they have archives back to 1990), why would anyone read the magazine?

The answer boiled down to experience. The print product offers a user experience that just can’t be replicated on the web. Conversely, the website does the same: you can’t do in print what you can online. There’s an extremely valuable lesson here. Your website isn’t about reproducing the print product on the web. It’s about taking the value and experience of your brand and leveraging it to create an independent, yet interconnected, online product, using all the resources the web has to offer but not trying to re-create your magazine.

When working on your website, always keep this question in mind: what kind of experience am I offering my readers? (And remember, this doesn’t just mean readers of the print magazine.) Keep this top of mind and, resource limitations aside, you can’t help but create a good product.

One of my students presented last week on New Scientist’s website. It’s not one I’d visited before but I was impressed with the clean, attractive home page design (it’s apparently a recent redesign).

The trend for a long time has been for the home page to be taken up with large image panels, often dynamically rotating. While these look attractive, I’ve never been a huge fan of their functionality – my experience is that they don’t get as many clicks as your prime real estate should. This site offers an alternative to the image panel theme, although some might argue that it fails in not having one dominant story. In my opinion, it’s simple and it works. I don’t get lost on the page.

Another site that recently had a redesign is glamour.com (as well as a domain shift – it used to be that glamour.com went to French Glamour). They’ve retained the rotating images but made them much smaller than on most sites, and given up a major part of the home page to links to their blogs – a great idea if you have lots of blogs as your home page is constantly being updated, which is good for return visitors as well as Google. I do think, though, that their site header takes up far too much space – I don’t get to any content until halfway down my window (I’m on a 1280 x 800 monitor).

What do you think of these sites? What are your favourite magazine website home pages?

One feature of Google that not everyone’s aware of is that its results change from country to country – searching something on google.ca will get you different results from google.com.

Why is this important? Well, to start with, Canadian sites will rank higher on google.ca as Google sees them as more relevant to the searcher. And most Canadian searchers will be on google.ca as in most cases, you are automatically rerouted, even if you type google.com. (The exception is in some searches in the navigation bar on your browser – I find I usually get routed to google.com there.)

Since most of us are looking for ad revenue, and our advertisers are generally looking for a Canadian audience, this is a good thing – it means more Canadians going to Canadian sites, which is the most useful kind of traffic.

So when checking your search results to see how you rank, make sure you’re checking google.ca – but look at google.com as well (or other English sites, like google.co.nz, for that matter) to see if you rank there, too. It’s interesting to compare the results.

And don’t be surprised if Google pushes our searches even more locally in the future.