Critical Reflection WINOL

Each year, WINOL is becoming more and more successful and during my time working on WINOL, I have seen huge improvements in the content that is being produced across the site. This has been shown through the numerous BJTC awards WINOL has won and the great popularity WINOL continues to achieve from its viewers. WINOL not only offers the latest current news affairs in and around Winchester, but also offers its audience entertaining features and sports updates along  with a weekly bulletin which is produced live at five every Wednesday. 

The best way to ensure that WINOL continues to improve is to look at the strengths and weaknesses of the content that we've produced and learn from them so we can continue to progress and achieve an industry standard project. However, though WINOL is a student project, everyone works together to make sure we provide a high standard, professional quality of work each year and each semester.

During this semester, WINOL became a lot more challenging for everyone. Each week we compared our website and content to our competitors, East London Lines. This is a student produced news website, much like WINOL, by students at the Goldsmiths College, The University of London. Each week, we looked at the strengths and weaknesses of both WINOL and East London Lines, so we were able to achieve target goals and work towards a stronger website overall.  

WINOL has gradually progressed. The website itself has had some huge improvements over the weeks in order to make it much more accessible. The first few weeks of the semester got off to a rocky start as we were trying to hugely improve our content and also find the right template for the site. The content started off quite poor particularly in news and features as not enough content was being produced. With the features, we decided that it would be much more professional and much more useful for our audience if we were to produce a number of different features to put up on the site daily rather than weekly like we had previously done.

 Alexa rankings started off quite poor and we found that as we produced more and more content, this significantly improved and we worked towards the idea that our audience were "coming for the news, and staying for the features." As our rankings began to boost, the news team made sure they produced a current and up to date news article every day to go on the site, rather than relying on the weekly WINOL bulletin on a Wednesday.

This year we had a huge change in format, as the web team decided it would be more beneficial to change the website format from Joomla to Wordpress. This brings a more formatted design which as a whole, made the website look neater and simpler to use and the content was much easier to navigate to, making it more useful for our audience. Wordpress also gave WINOL a broadsheet style which overall looked much more professional and is easier to maintain. This year we have also improved in our advertising of WINOL. Everyone, from production, news and features, got into the habit of using social media websites such as Twitter, to tweet whilst they were out working on a story to ensure that our audience were able to get updates from WINOL anytime and anywhere so not only can we gain new viewers, but also to keep our audience updated and therefore, interested. We found that over time this successfully pushed more traffic towards our site, and we were also beginning to gain a loyal readership. 

Due to the continuous promoting from the team on social networking sites, people are now spending an average of 7.04 minutes on the site, which has risen compared to previous weeks. It has also been agreed that this semester, WINOL has produced more stories and features which are better suited to our target audience. We also had a larger team this semester in comparison to the last two semesters and so more content was able to be produced more frequently. 

A lot of problems did arise due to lack of communication between the team. Chris stressed the importance of communicating between each other so if ever a member of the team is off sick or is unable to produce their story or package, we can have a back-up story or someone can fill their place before the deadline so we're not a story short. As a team, we did learn from this and improved on our communication skills between each other so this problem wouldn't arise in the future. 

Bulletins were strong and on time this year however, the lack of communication between senior members of the team did prevent a bulletin from going out on time and this would have caused a crucial problem for our viewers so it is massively important to stay connected and organised as a team.  

Overall, the huge improvement I have seen in WINOL this semester is the improvement in our Alexa Rankings which is a massive significance and most important factor in tracking the professional and entertaining level of WINOL amongst our audience.

This semester, I continued my role on WINOL as a features writer and producer and this semester the features team along with the web production team, completely revamped the features part of the site, giving it a whole new and improved structure and appearance to make the features clearer and easily accessible. We created a features magazine for the website called ABSOLUTE:LY. This was set out to target a bigger female audience which we hadn't previously done before. However this was influenced by the popularity of 'Shemail' in the Daily Mail. Not only does 'Shemail' feature in their paper, the Daily Mail also have a feature magazine targeted at woman on their site and so ABSOLUTE:LY allowed us to be more professional and gain a new and larger audience. 

The features themselves looked much more organised as they were put under specific category titles in the magazine, such as hair, makeup, and shopping. This meant the layout of the features and the magazine as a whole were better presented compared to previous features. This also meant they we covered different topics so our audience would get to used to understanding that if, for example, they wanted to know what the latest fashionable hairstyle was, they could come to our site for all the latest hair trends and tips, and the same for people interested in makeup and clothes. 

I also found that this semester, we were producing more visual and written content including much more photos and written pieces to go with the photos rather than video content. In my first semester I had just produced video features with a written version to go with it, but this semester I felt it was a huge improvement to be producing more photo based and written features. This allowed me to develop skills from both styles of features, however, the content of the features I produced and the photos themselves looked much more professional compared to the videos I had previously produced and they were better suited to the style of the magazine.

I think the features improved mostly this semester, particularly on the production side as the team was bigger and had better editorial management. I felt like I had improved a lot this semester in the terms of the content I was producing. I think it took a while for the team to get into their roles and to start producing content during the first couple of weeks as the site itself was improving, however, the features definitely pulled though and everyone started to produce regular high standard work. 

I enjoyed producing video reviews in my first semester, and so this semester I decided to carry on producing regular reviews but this time in the style of a magazine so they were written with plenty of photos to go with them. This also allowed the audience to know that they could visit our site regularly knowing that they could get all the latest tips and advice on the current hair and makeup products. 

I produced a particular hair product review for Dry Shampoo, which is an everyday essential to most young girls and women. However, when I produced my review I didn't just use one product to review, I decided to compare to high street brands, which are available to buy from all different stores in order to give the audience more valuable advice. I chose two different brands of Dry Shampoo, both with a significant price difference so the audience could see which brand I thought was more worth the money. This is particularly relevant to our student audience which is our target audience, as price is hugely important to students on a budget. 

However, I also chose to compare two brands, available at different stores as I wanted to ensure I was being equal in my comment and not bias towards a particular brand or store, which was an issue I learnt from a previous restaurant review from my first semester. I did this for all my hair and makeup product reviews to keep the same style throughout. 

I also learnt the importance of photos and images during this semester as well. Chris stressed that it always important to use our own images where we can to prevent any copyright issues, and to always remember to credit the image if it isn't our own. However, I wanted to get used to taking my own images so I avoided using any images from creative commons so that problem wouldn't arise. I also learnt that people are always more interested in seeing faces and action shots, so for my hair and makeup reviews I always used close ups of peoples faces, I zoomed right into their face rather than keeping a distance as this is always more appealing to viewers.

I took as many relevant images as I could from all different angles to put into my written review to add to the appeal. I also learnt how to style my images in my article to create a more magazine double-page spread look, to fit in with the magazine style. For my first review, I had put my photos between paragraphs of writing, and by the second review, I learnt that it was actually much more professional to create a double-page image almost like a collage of photos, with numbers and then a description of each numbered item in a box and all edited together to create one big image spread. 

Overall, the content and appearance of mine, and all the other features which were produced have hugely improved on a professional level. The content from news, features and sport are becoming more and more frequent and alexa rankings are continuing to progress. I have learnt a huge amount from working on WINOL, and I still have a huge passion for features. It has been great to see the website improve and I will keep connected to WINOL to see its continuous success.