Whats Wrong With Rediff?
Posted on November 15, 2009
Filed Under News, Science & Technology |
I am not amongst those who stir their morning tea with a newspaper and gulp down their throat all the news from across the world. Though, since the day I have started to write for this blog, I have become a little interested in news. But I still don’t hide my face in the newspaper every morning. I prefer to read news online. Its easier to copy hyperlinks :p
A few days ago, I came across a news piece about Rediff.com’s losses. I waited for a week to see any follow up of the story but to my surprise, there were none. Or probably I didn’t find something relevant. I don’t have anything to do with rediff’s profits or losses. I am not an employee and neither do I own a stake in it. The only thing is that I am an emotional person(If I travel in a train for 2 days, I feel attached to the train at the time of getting off). My very first encounter with the World Wide Web was Rediff.com. My first email ID ever was with rediff and I still use it. I just don’t want it to go unnoticed. Its been loosing traffic and ad revenues as well. Even the recent face lift was not able to direct more traffic.
As I am no expert and could only give a general end-user opinion about it. What I did was that I just opened Yahoo.com, MSN.com and Rediff.com on three tabs simultaenously and just had a look at their homepages. What I was able to think from my small mind was that the look was not an eye-catcher. I mean the recent changed homepage of rediff is designed keeping in view, the ease mobile users. I happen to use net from my mobile also and for that I will give Rediff a 10 on 10, but in imroving the mobile appearance, Rediff has probably ignored the people who use it on PC. (This point was also raised by some person on his blog but unfortunately I forgot where I read that or else I would have given that link here.) When you have a 17-inch display (at least I have) and what you see is that the entire homepage is concentrated in just the middle portion of the screen, sorry to say, but it fails to leave a mark. Not only that, even the news bits, in smaller fonts and almost zero image support, couldn’t persuade a user to click on them. In fact, many a times, it has happened with me, that when I sign out of yahoo, on being redirected to the homepage, I can’t stop myself from clicking on at least one of the stories featured there. They simply look so very appealing with their graphical UI.
One more suggestion here could be, the redirection of user to the homepage automatically (like in Yahoo), when the user logs out from mail. Rediff.com has removed all the ads from irs homepage in order to give the end-user a more subtle experience (probably!). It sure was an audacious move, as removal of homepage ads must have caused a further decrement in the already dminishing ads’ revenues. I never had any problem with the ads that appear on the homepages of Yahoo or MSN. In fact, I feelthat they simply add up to the live liness of the page and many a times useful too.
The features, be it shopping, Q&A, mail, blogs, news etc are already good and up to the mark but it needs to reach people. Rediff needs to make its presence felt on the World Wide Web. Probably try a few more marketing stints, a little bit of social networking might help too (maybe, I told you am no expert) and probably a new UI. I know, they changed it very recently but whats the use if its not working?
Well, that was all I had to say. I hope the people at rediff.com would do something to improve its ranking and revenues as well. I just wish them All The Very Best !!!
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A friend of mine just emailed me one of your articles from a while back. I read that one a few more. Really enjoy your blog. Thanks