81% OF REPORTERS USE CORPORATE WEBSITES
Arketi Group
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81% of business journalists turn to corporate websites and webinars when looking for story ideas, breaking news, or seeking a corporate spokesperson.
98% look for contact information.
94% look for the search box.
87% look for text documents.
84% look for PDFs.
79% want publication-quality images.
THOUGHT: It may seem obvious but you’d be surprised how often corporate websites make it difficult for the media to find information within their own online newsrooms.
Thankfully, the days of password-protected online newsrooms appears to have come and gone.
Still, it is remarkable how little thought often goes into trying to understand what exactly journalists may be looking for and how a site can be designed to make it as easy as possible for them to do a story about you.
Stories, of course, aren’t always positive but even then, a well designed online newsroom should have the flexibility to help you respond to crises.
With most reporters looking for a contact, that information should be front and center and the person to whom reporters are directed should have the power to respond immediately.
PDFs, however, are the bane of my existence when dealing with web redesign projects. The problem is that they create a horrible experience for the visitor. If the links to them are not labeled as PDFs, the Acrobat reader launches unexpectedly and takes a lot longer to download than a simple web page would.
They are particularly a pain in the derriere when it comes to search. You have far less control over the presentation of links to PDF in search results than you do with normal web pages and, when a searcher clicks on such a link, there are no navigational elements to visit the rest of your website.
They create a virtual dead end.
KEYWORD WEDNESDAY: Eight of the top twenty searches at Google yesterday had to do with a sex scandal.
Thank you for hand sanitizer.
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