I have been a regular reader of http://www.deccanchronicle.com/ [DC in short], a hyderabad based english paper for the past 4 years now, as a weak connection to anything hyderabad. The only reason I used to tolerate reading the online version and badly designed site was that it was the only english newspaper. Yes we had Telugu papers, but the presentation and technology improved only in recent times. [earlier readers had to look at scanned images folks not the cool present day UTF fonts..] So sometime early Jan 2009, DC got a facelift. It now emulates certain CMS based news sites, and a vast improvement from the old version. Me being me, I had to look under the hood! I saw the site was composed of a gazillion divs, instead of tables and cells. [Look up the source of timesofindia, and you can see a host of tables over there!] I was impressed. [W3c standards? Atleast an attempt? Yes yes yes! Hallelujah!]
Since Dec. 2008, I am a signed up member of the e-paper as Deccan Chronicle calls it. The experience is really really good, and I feel like I am back in Hyderabad, reading the real actual paper. Wow!
What takes me back memory lane is the movies pages, counterpoint[daily cartoon], sealed tender notices [govt. bid advertisements], obituaries and classifieds!
User Experience:
Navigation
All you need to do is select any of the pages by using the scroll area on the right.
When you mouse over each article, the particular area is color highlighted.
Accessing an article:
When you click on a particular article, you get to see whatever picture and associated text in a pop-up window. Pretty neat I must say.
All this archiving was possible from some neat archiving software developed by folks called “Pressmart”
And typing the url “http://www.dc-epaper.com/” will take you to the most recent archive or the latest dated paper. So you are always pointing to the current article!
Features
Headline only view, my clippings, text zoom, read article [aural media], print, email article. Accessing articles is achieved via a calendar function accessed through an icon..
http://www.dc-epaper.com/DC/DCH/2009/01/29/index.shtml
So a pretty good move on the papers part, recognizing that it has global readers and catering to the same.