CNN.com gets a facelift

Stuart Corner
Monday, 02 July 2007 06:26

Your IT - Home IT

CNN has staged a "global relaunch" of CNN.com so as to better integrate different news formats: video, audio, images and text and to offer users a greater degree of personalisation.

CNN has created what it claims is "a fully integrated experience in which articles, videos, images and user-generated content all come together to give users a more enriching, immediate interaction with the news content and information they need and want." It claims the new site is the result of the work of "hundreds of developers" and incorporates "hundreds of thousands of lines of code," and "the culmination of over a year of listening, researching, analysing, and building a site to meet [users'] needs." The site has been in beta for several weeks.

However CNN  adds that the revamp is intended to be 'subtle' and that users will see gradual change as new features are added in coming months.

CNN boasts that, with the site's enhancements and redesign, "users can access the news of the day through a story package that provides text, images, video related stories and user-generated content."  Users can also personalise CNN.com with enhanced local weather forecasts and local headlines.

This content comes from various sources and content-sharing relationships, including Live from anywhere CNN.com's affiliates and the recently announced strategic alliance with Internet Broadcasting, the US's largest publisher of TV station web sites.

A new 'Hot Topics' section provides "in-depth multi-media content based on timely, newsworthy stories". A "From the Blogs" feature, aggregates comments from blogs around the Web discussing either a specific story or topics related to one published on CNN.com.

CNN.com was launched in 1995 and claims to attracts an average of more than 24 million unique users each month.