I don’t say this often, but I have to hand it to the Daily Mail. And I’m not being sarcastic! Because their website is really rather good.

Last week some journalists got all excited because the latest ABCe figures came out, telling them just how many people are reading their words. Marcus Warren from The Telegraph (or TCUK as it is apparently now known… Christ) said:

As is always the way with statistics, everyone has something to crow about in last week’s ABC Electronic figures for July, most notably the Daily Mail. Theirs was certainly the headline-grabbing performance , one so impressive that it appeared to shock most of the blogging media pudits into silence. All power to the Mail then.

Telegraph link via Martin Stabe.

The Media Guardian report says that the Daily Mail website was visited by 11,865,039 unique users, over three quarters of whom are visiting from outside the UK. (Insert your own “they come to our country stealing our bandwidth” joke here.) This makes it the most popular newspaper website apart from Guardian Unlimited.

It’s astonishing in one way because just a few years ago the Daily Mail did not even have a website. Now it has one of the most popular in the country. You have to admit that their website is pretty slick compared to a lot of newspaper websites.

This is probably helped by the fact that it is relatively new. A lot of newspaper websites were designed several years ago. In the intervening period they have had to shoehorn in features like RSS feeds, blogs, comment systems, social bookmarking and goodness knows what else. These websites are now cluttered full of stuff that they were not originally designed to accommodate. Sometimes jumping from page to page presents you with jarring differences in style (hello, Guardian Unlimited).

The Daily Mail, meanwhile, produced a slick website that had all of these features from the get-go. Maybe a few years down the line the Mail’s website will also begin to creak heavily due to old age. But there is something else that sets the Daily Mail website apart from the others.

The Mail’s website makes heavy use of images. Each article is full of images, and they are not tiny little ones stuck in the corner. In fact, most of them take up the same width as a paragraph. It looks fantastic.

On many other newspaper websites, all too often you could find yourself reading an article that does not have any images in it, even if the original print version did. This is especially irritating when the article actually makes reference to the image. This is not much use if you are using the website where you can’t see it!

Perhaps for this very reason, whenever I follow a link to the Daily Mail’s website, I usually find myself exploring one or two more pages before going away. Its design and approach actually encourages me to read further, even though I am the sort of person who would not touch a hard copy of the Daily Mail with a bargepole!

Holyrood Watcher has recently been complaining about newspaper websites. He seems to have been set off by the website of the Sunday Herald. And who could blame him? It is a truly dire website.

I mean, just look at it. If you read the bit in the top right hand corner that says “Est. 1999″ you might be tempted to think that this was the last time the website was touched. But no. The Sunday Herald must be one of the few MSM websites that has actually become worse over time.

Compare today’s front page with a few from years gone by that I have found on the Wayback Machine. even better in 2002.

Today? It is almost as if they want to turn visitors away. The older versions hint at masses of content to choose from. Check out the navigation links on the left-hand side of the old sites — nowhere to be seen today. Now there is just a list of three stories from each section, with no images like the old websites. Astonishingly stale and not at all enticing.

I have only spoken about the design so far. There are also the technical problems that Holyrood Watcher mentions. I missed what happened last Sunday, but I know the problem with words running into each other. In fact, it seems to happen on practically every article these days. Check out the first few paragraphs of this week’s main story:

SEVEN PEOPLE, including two girls, were last night being heldoverthekillingof 11-year-old Rhys Jones. Five were arrested in raids yesterdayaroundtheCroxteth area of Liverpool, wheretheschoolboy was shot on Wednesday.

Police were granted an extension to detain the sixth, a boy of 15, who was arrested on Friday.

Theyarresteda seventh teenager last night. The 19-year-old man from the local area is being questioned by detectives on suspicion of murder.

This takes the total of people in custodylastnighttoseven.Nine have been arrested in total, with two currently on bail.

I mean, how does this even happen? Is it not easy to fix? It really is as if nobody checks to make sure the website is working properly. I don’t understand why they do not just move the Sunday Herald’s content onto The Herald’s website, which is miles better.

Holyrood Watcher also makes a good point about The Scotsman (which is down at the moment of writing!). In this era of Web 2.0, blogging and all the rest of it, what use is their potentially interesting content doing behind a subscription wall?

I don’t know how much traffic newspaper sites get from blogs, but it must be quite a lot these days. Yet The Scotsman locks away the content that bloggers would be most likely to link to. Newspapers that persist on locking their content away need to look to The Guardian, the most popular newspaper website around. It seems to survive perfectly fine without having to offer any “premium” content.

I have no complaints about the design of The Times website. They recently radically overhauled the design of the website and it looks tip-top now (although a lot of people probably still wonder — why lime green?). And they managed to achieve it all in one go, unlike the uncomfortable bit-by-bit redesign of Guardian Unlimited.

But, as Holyrood Watcher points out, where is Ecosse now? David Farrer complained about it way back in February. He was told that it would come back, but it is still nowhere to be seen.

A couple of weeks ago I spotted Ryan Morrison saying:

BBC News is in need of a major redesign to bring it inline with the web2.0 world. There are so many new concepts, ideas and services surrounding the new web that the old News Template is creaking a bit.

He has a point. As I mentioned before, most of the newspaper websites have been struggling to smoothly integrate Web 2.0 features into their old websites.

But I think the BBC News website is a lot better than its rivals from the press. The pages are not nearly as cluttered and are still pleasant to look at. This is no doubt helped by the fact that they do not contain obtrusive adverts that the other sites have to carry.

Of all of the news sites on the internet, I like BBC News the most by far. At the moment my second port of call is Scotsman.com, but only because the current “under reconstruction” nature of Guardian Unlimited really gets on my nerves.

For more on newspaper websites, check out Martin Belam’s astonishingly in-depth posts at Currybet.

There is a fixture of the modern web that I really don’t understand. And in terms of annoyance it is probably second only to Snap Preview.

Millions of links to social bookmarking websites littering the bottom of every news article and blog post written. You know the ones. “Digg this!” “Send to del.icio.us!” “Pimp-me-do to Reddit!”

A particularly bad example comes from one certain WordPress plugin which appends this awful mess onto every post:

I mean, just what the hell are you supposed to do with that?

It is not just blogs that do this sort of thing. Many major newspaper websites also now incorporate such links pretty much as a matter of course. Thankfully, they tend to show a bit more restraint than that WordPress plugin.

BBC News has become the latest website to add such buttons to its news stories. Thankfully, they too have kept it relatively restrained, with simple links to five of the most popular social bookmarking services.

Ryan Morrison thinks that the inclusion of the buttons is a good move from the BBC (by the way, sorry, Ryan, for nicking your screengrab! I’m not leeching off your bandwidth though, honest). But I just don’t understand why they go to that bother.

I have steadfastly refused to include such buttons on this blog. For one, the advantages of being submitted to Digg are dubious (something like having hundreds of drunk arseholes coming into your living room to violently vomit on your carpet before going away without paying the cleaning bill, never to be seen again).

But this is what I really don’t understand about these social bookmarking links. As Inquisitor points out, surely if you wanted to submit a story to del.icio.us, Digg or whatever, you would already know how to do it. If you make a habit out of Digging a site, you will surely have the relevant plugins / browser buttons installed in your browser. Why rely on the disparate approaches taken by the near-infinite number of websites on the internet when you have that trusty button in your browser?

I am a heavy user of del.icio.us. Yet I have never used one of the buttons placed on a website itself. I always use the buttons that I have installed on my browser. I am familiar with these plugins. I know exactly where to find them and what to expect when I click them.

Most major social bookmarking websites have Firefox extensions or little bookmarks that you can drag into your toolbar. The above image is a screenshot of the navigation toolbar bar in Firefox. Next to the address field are two different buttons for del.icio.us (one for my main account, the other for Scottish Roundup). Then, if I should feel like Digging a story there is a Digg button. Next to that is one for StumbleUpon. Facebook has an entire toolbar if you really want to use it.

You might say, “Okay, maybe that is how you submit stories to social bookmarking websites. But you are an awful geek. What about the rest of us?” Maybe so, but how many normal, non-geek, web users are users of social bookmarking websites? If you took the geeks off the internet, social bookmarking websites would probably not exist at all.

I would be interested to know how often the buttons used on websites like BBC News and blogs are really used. I can’t imagine they are used that much. Why would you, when you can use browser buttons that are so much more efficient?

Still, I guess the links placed on websites must work, otherwise nobody would bother with them. I have pondered installing Alex King’s “Share This” plugin. At least it quite sensibly hides the ugly smorgasbord of links before you actively ask to be shown them. But still, why would you do that when you — presumably — already have your own trusted methods of posting an item to your social bookmarking website of choice?

One of the strangest things on the entire internet (and that really is saying something) is the BBC News feature, Most Popular Now. It can be found in the sidebar of most pages on the BBC News website. I often have a glance at it because often you do find some interesting stories there.

But it is really weird. Sometimes you see stories in there that are literally four or five years old. And it is not as if they are particularly interesting stories either. Okay, so that story about the bloke who was forced to marry a goat (and the goat’s subsequent suffocation on a plastic bag) was quite funny.

But the other day a rather unenlightening (and distinctly not very newsy) article about how to write a CV was right up there in the top five “most emailed”. Why would you email that to someone? To “gently hint” that you think they might be bad at writing CVs?

Today, for seemingly no good reason, this three-year-old story about a link between milk and ovarian cancer is the second most emailed story at the moment.

I realise that it is quite banal to point out the often contradictory nature of scientific studies on the various health effects of food. Red wine makes your heart happy but your liver sad. We all know it, and we are bombarded with so much contradictory information that we really might as well not bother.

You remember that advert that showed a girl guzzling down five litres of cooking oil because that is just what eating crisps is like (if you eat your annual consumption of crisps all in one go)? Almost put me off eating crisps. The next day I visited the dentist. He told me to eat more crisps and less chocolate. Not that I eat much chocolate anyway. I eat about three packets of crisps per day, so it’s a wonder I don’t constantly pee cooking oil.

Anyway, to veer back from that self-indulgent tangent, the point I am trying to make is this. It is slightly funny that the story about milk maybe possibly perhaps causing ovarian cancer was gazumped by a story saying that milk could cut the risk of getting diabetes and heart disease.

Helpfully, the related stories are: Milk in tea ‘blocks health gains’, Drinking milk ‘no risk to heart’ and Milk linked to Parkinson’s risk. So now you know.

One side effect of what is now sickeningly called “the Lewis Hamilton effect” (i.e. media-driven bollocks-hype), is that now journalists are being expected by their employers to cover more F1. Moreover, whenever Lewis Hamilton fails to win (which is every race of his career so far, let us not forget), somebody must be to blame. It could not be down to the fact that, for instance, golden boy Lewis was maybe not fast enough to win.

So today Ron Dennis is being criticised for doing what any team principal worth his salt would do — ensuring that his two drivers don’t crash into each other. This BBC News article is called “McLaren deny anti-Hamilton bias”.

The fact that Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso backed off from having an on-track battle is being construed as team orders. Of course, had Alonso and Hamilton had an on-track battle and then crashed into each other, everybody would be pointing the finger at Ron Dennis asking why he allowed them to race each other.

It’s difficult to remember the last time the McLarens were so dominant during a race. Today they lapped everybody apart from Felipe Massa, and even he was far behind due to the Ferrari’s long wheelbase which is very badly suited to the twisty Monte Carlo circuit. I’m guessing the last time McLaren had such an advantage over the competition was Australia 1998.

Despite being the most famous race of the F1 season, the Monaco Grand Prix is usually the most boring. This is because it is almost impossible to overtake on. Its tight and twisty corners are notoriously difficult for F1 cars to negotiate one abreast, never mind two abreast. Racing on the circuit has famously been described as like “flying a helicopter in your living room” by Nelson Piquet.

McLaren’s supreme advantage, combined with the fact that it is near enough impossible to overtake at Monaco, would have made any other course of action complete suicide for the team. Had Alonso and Hamilton crashed out, McLaren would have lost 18 points — net 24 points when you consider the extra points Ferrari would have scooped up.

In F1 championship terms, that is a huge amount of points to give away — almost two and a half race wins’ worth. Had the McLarens crashed out today, it would have been enough for them to lose the lead of the Championship.

It is not as if Alonso and Hamilton weren’t trying. A number of times during the race both McLarens looked a bit sideways, particularly in the Swimming Pool complex. As it was, they were almost chucking their cars into the barriers.

And let’s not forget that in the straight fight in qualifying, Hamilton was unable to beat Alonso (both in qualifying 3 which determines the grid, and in qualifying 2 where the fuel loads are equal). Had Hamilton been faster, the so-called “team orders” would have been to his advantage. So maybe if he wants to win a race, next time he should be fast enough to do so. Hamilton knows this. It’s not exactly rocket science.

In other words, nice try, MSM. Keep digging for that juicy Hamilton story. Unfortunately this isn’t it. I am sure it will come sooner or later without you having to resort to hype or outright distortions.

Incidentally, I was quite amused / enraged by a couple of things James Allen said over the course of the weekend. It is a typical example of how the media has lost sight of the reality, caught up as they are in the rush to create a star out of Lewis Hamilton, thereby allowing them to line their pockets.

[It is Lewis Hamilton's] fifth grand prix weekend. A lot of people say there’s too much hype around Hamilton. But it’s not about hype; it’s about performance and results. That’s what creates the headlines.

Well, that’s what should create the headlines. But what about performance? What about results? Just ask James Allen’s five-year-old son.

My five-year-old son said to me when I got back from Barcelona, “Dad, I don’t think Lewis is any good.”
“Why not, son?”, I said.
“Because he never wins; he always finishes second!”
[Laughs] I tried to explain, but eh… [sentence trails off]

But eh… didn’t your son have a point? I’m not a big fan of kids, but I always admire the way their minds have not been warped out of shape by society. They can think infinitely more clearly than anyone above the age of about 12.

And here we have an example of a five-year-old seeing straight through all of the hype, clearly able to see that Lewis Hamilton has not yet demonstrated very much. Everyone else is too busy trying to create hype, or being wound up in nationalistic pride.

James Allen’s son knows more about F1 than his dad, who happens to be ITV’s main F1 commentator (much to the fans’ chagrin). The bottom line is that Lewis Hamilton’s F1 career is only five races old. And five races do not a career make.

We’ve not seen him race in the wet, we’ve not seen how he copes under pressure, we’ve not seen how he reacts when he makes a mistake. We’ve not seen whether or not he has the qualities required to be an F1 champion. And we won’t know until he is the world champion.

A lot of crass comparisons with Ayrton Senna are being made. Let’s not forget that just a short decade ago Jackie Stewart was describing Jan Magnussen as “the new Ayrton Senna”. Magnussen was subsequently sacked mid-way through his second season for being crap. Where is he now?