I am concerned about the new Daily Helmsman Website. Aside from the fact that you bought the domain www.dailyhelmsman.com instead of using a server with the memphis.edu domain like all other University related sites (dailyhelmsman.memphis.edu?).
I wanted to talk about the actual site itself. First of all, you're offering e-mail? The signup form was hidden and didn't even work for me, but besides that, The University is trying to get everyone to use Postoffice, The University's official e-mail service. Do you think it's wise to offer a competing product?
Personally, since every student, faculty, and staff member should have a postoffice account (or will within months) I would think a link to http://postoffice.memphis.edu would be better. That would allow everyone to check their University e-mail via the web.
Otherwise the page itself looked good visually, but had little substance. I typed "computer" in the search field and the first link that came up was titled "Interested in politics? Opportunity knocks" and didn't have the word "computer" anywhere in the page.
A link titled "Projectors and laptop stolen from Mendocino,Alpine halls" (the 6th one down) had no content. It did have 2 nice banner ads though. Where are Mendocino and alpine hall anyway? South Campus? When I clicked on the policebeat link it came up with some "Query returned no results" errors and under another banner ad was a nice message stating "PoliceBeat info goes here."
I realize that you just started the Website, but if you're going to advertise it, at least put last week's Police Beat there.
Finally I'd like to address the ads. My personal opinion is that banner ads are annoying and a poor way to get people interested in your product. My personal opinions aside, I think this is the only other University Website that has ads (Campus Pipeline being the other). All the ads I saw on The Helmsman site were for non-profit groups though, so I don't really have a problem with the ads' content. I just don't like the amount of ads there were. There are 2 on every page. And does the school get any money from these ads being run on the site?
I think this is information that needs to get out.
