The Roar is a online-only outlet. It is a sports opinion site for professionals and non-professionals. Anyone can send in an article to The Roar for publication, but not all get published. The Roar also have its own writers or experts, as they call them, who publish articles/columns regularly.
Australia vs Kuwait
The website has two main columns; one with articles from The Roar experts, and one with articles from the crowd which can be anyone with an opinion about sports. On top of these two columns they have different sports categories, which makes it easier to navigate the site. They have also used different colours on the headlines of the two main columns to make it easier to distinguish between the two.
Comparing The Roar, an online-only outlet, with offline outlets or mixed online/offline outlets
The Roar is an opinion site only so it’s not that easy to compare it to other outlets, because most other outlets has a mixture of stories and not only opinion pieces. But I will try anyway.
The first thing that caught my eye when I went through a few sports news websites, like Fox Sports, Sky Sports and ESPN, was that they all had a box up the top with their top story/stories. This is something that The Roar is missing. I think, if you put one or a few stories in a box on top of your website, it’s easier to draw people in to the site.
All of the four websites has an add at the top of their page, so there is no difference there. They are all trying to get their revenue from advertisers.
The American outlets, Sky Sports and ESPN, have a shorter front page than the two Australian outlets. The Roar has the longest front page with a lot of different opinion pieces packed underneath each other in the two main columns. Fox Sports has categories of different sports at the top as Sky Sports and ESPN but still feel the need to have the same categories underneath their top story box, which makes their front page longer. Is this necessary? I don’t really think so, but I think some people prefer it that way.
I look at sporting websites with new eyes after learning how to set up my own blog in Online News. It’s very interesting how just a tiny thing like a box with top stories can make a big difference to a website.
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