This magazine website has a lot of interactive web 2.0 features such as the “diary of a fashionista” which has an accessible link to add the photographic slide show directly to your myspace or to make your own slide show with different themed background for your photos. It also has a virtual model where you can try on various clothes advertised and the various new hairstyles featured in the issue, a bank of videos with all of the major names from the masthead. All of the articles (including the dating and travel blogs) on the website include links on the top and bottom of each to add to Kaboodle, Pop, Digg, Del.icio.us, facebook and RSS (in bright colours and with full explanations for how to use them and what they are).
With the articles always in the centre of the page and the interactive components like blogs, clubs and virtual activities constantly on the side, Marie Claire’s website is very user-friendly for new readers and those that come from the print version. However, they don’t seem to have any advertising, except for itself, with ads for paid subscriptions, google links and for the other magazines that Hearst owns. There is a link for potential advertisers of the online component to look at, so it is unclear why those in the print magazine have not carried over into the web version.
If Marie Claire is void of advertisements, People’s online magazine definitely makes up for the lack thereof. However, while the site does have links for RSS (AOL, Google, MSN, netvibes and Yahoo), it does not highlight the possible feeds in an area of the page that would help the advertisers and magazine distribute more links throughout the web—instead, it puts them in a blue, small typeface at the bottom left-hand corner of the page.
The website has podcasts (with a podcast archive), and even a video feed with celebrity interviews—a page which has the links for adding the site or specific videos to Del.icio.us, Facebook and Digg. It might benefit the website though to have the links at the top of the pages, to give more access to share the site and its articles. But the online magazine is well organized and designed in a user friendly fashion, and thus the uncluttered articles and ads do not hide the other interactive components (such as RSS and social bookmarking), even though they may not put them into the forefront of the audience’s screen.
This online magazine, while extremely busy in editorial content and advertising, manages to have their RSS link at the very top of the page, on the right hand side of the panel, with the Maclean’s logo, which stays there the whole time you browse. You don’t have to search the page to find it—your eye goes there immediately. There are blogs for National Affairs, Culture and Education, that have another RSS link attached to them (in addition to the constant one at the top of the page).
The blogs are very easy to find and navigate, and so are the eight different forums they have to chat with other readers about issues such as education, world and national news etc. The advertising is mostly off to the right side of each page, so that the reader may browse through the articles and blogs undisturbed in their content, but always aware of that extra column of clearly defined advertisements. And, at the end of the articles, in a separately (and well marked) box are the links to share via social bookmarking, under the title of “Share”: Del.icio.us, Facebook, Digg, Seed Newsvine, Stumble It!, Technorati links. Both reader and advertiser, I think, would be satisfied with the strategy and organization of content, accessible sharing tools and advertising.
Great Dane 
You Say