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The CBC Web site has an enormous responsibility: it has to cater to Canadians from coast to coast, providing a huge amount of fresh content in an elegant and exciting way. And all with a relatively small budget. How do they do it?
In 1993 Joe Lawlor installed a web server deep in the bowels of the CBC flagship complex on Front Street in Toronto, and was left alone — nobody at the corporation's higher levels paid that much attention.
Lawlor, a radio technician, began experimenting with early web technology, and started offering up pages about CBC Radio and its programs, in the ham-fisted design, and ham-radio ethos of the infant Internet.
Today the CBC website serves over 7 million pages, and more than one million audio and video streams a month, and it has content on every CBC core production on both television and radio. Now they are paying attention — and Mr. Lawlor now has better digs, hardware, and support.
In the early days, almost spontaneously, at the same time as Lawlor's efforts, web projects sprang up here and there around the CBC universe (RealTime in Vancouver, and DNTO in Winnipeg were noteworthy), and it was all loosely stitched together under the cbc.ca address.
There was a real patchwork feel to the site, and no consistent navigation or look and feel. Today the CBC has at least 30 or more dedicated web development folks and multitudes more on the show's production staffs providing content and updating their pages. They also have established a serious management hierarchy around web development, which has reach up into the highest offices at the network.
“We are re-inventing ourselves as a corporation — everyone has to be mindful of a new media world, a convergent media”, says Lawlor, now Radio Webmaster.
CBC show producers and technical staff are now encouraged to learn about web design, and are mandated to take charge of the vision of their micro-sites within the overall web architecture. The web support team, of whom Lawlor is a key member, is responsible for keeping the boxes humming and the bytes flying, and for providing support and design services to the show's producers.
They have even branched out into complete Web-only production pieces such as the cheeky and crisp 'Zine Infoculture, and the CBC4Kids site (see below), with its sleek production values and CD-ROM like user interface.
The best pages on the site are these web-centric efforts, and the overall navigational structure pages that keep the experience coherent for the user — which is no easy feat with over 100 shows and 100,000 unique pages of content. Users can get lost in the site, and often the designs deep inside bear no resemblance to the doorway; but, sometimes the fun can be in the travelling, and seeing (and hearing) your favourite personalities and their own way of communicating on the web.
The front door is always available no matter where you are in the site, usually a link at the bottom of any page — so you can always get home, Dorothy.
“The whole architecture isn't as developed as we'd like it to be on some of the interior pages, and we're looking at being more consistent there as we move forward — we're migrating in that direction as we update inside pages and anytime we add new content”, says John Lewis Executive Director of New Media.
The site uses all the latest tricks to encourage loitering, or what are called “sticky” pages in the web design business. Lewis maintains that users spend, on average, an impressive 11 minutes on each page, and this is a number that will grow as the more sophisticated content comes online. An example is the main front door, which has a personalization feature which allows users to customize the page to show only the content which interests them.
Another example is the deploying of bulletin board discussion areas, which encourage repeat visits, and foster community. These types of sticky ideas increase page views, and can influence surfers to use the site as their entrance way to the 'Net every time they log on (referred to as a Portal play in the tired buzzwords of new media). Page views equals ad banners served, which equals revenue — and voila, you have a business model justification for spending time and resources creating web content.
Advertising revenue is a motherhood issue at the CBC. The public broadcaster proudly carries no pitches on its radio airwaves, but the radio section of its website does. Web development is expensive, and advertising provides a revenue stream which can help offset those costs. This is the same at all large web ventures, they are either underwritten by the marketing departments, or must stand on their own, within the slippery economics of the burgeoning web.
With budget jihads almost a yearly experience at the CBC, it is a struggle for a new medium such as the web to justify having a hand out, without offering some shekels for the coffers.
“There isn't a real costing strategy for this, but I think everyone recognizes it saves a lot of money at a business level with things like long distance charges and meetings and such . It's not just web pages but a whole web infrastructure that helps people get things done on a day-to-day basis. We run ads to offset costs and increase the content that's available. It's just banners, we don't as of yet insert any spots into the media files. I think most people accept banners, that that's the way this business has to be done”, says Lawlor.
To assist broadcasting production folks in producing pages for the site, the web development support team has a proprietary web based publishing system called Insite (from Digital Wizards out of Montreal), which allows anyone on the shows to quickly add content to their sub-sections.
HTML, the lingua-franca of web page construction, is not even required to use this tool, as the pages are constructed from pre-set templates, and published from a simple point and click interface — this frees up the web support staff to concentrate more on the core architecture pages, and improving the overall user experience, by working with the shows on the template design.
“The producers and program assistants can promote from their desktops using the same tools they are already using for their shows. They are just two clicks from publishing. It takes just a couple of hours with us to set up their templates, and then they're independent. We couldn't do it any other way, if we had to work all the time with every show there's no way we could do it”, says Lawlor.
If they are more ambitious, shows can bypass the cookie cutter promotion system, and try and produce their own code and pages themselves. Infoculture for example is worked on all day, updated 10-15 times by Senior Online Producer Tessa Sproule, who scours the 'Net and CBC content for relevant links and content.
“Most of the code is drawn by Dreamweaver (Macromedia's WYSIWYG web tool), I can tweak it if I want in Homesite (a text based code editor), but I really consider myself more of a journalist/editor than a techie. I came to the CBC because they were doing some really exciting stuff on the web — things like DNTO, Take Five, and Global Village are really out on the edge of what this medium can do”, enthuses Sproule.
Sproule, whose project is only served on the web, can justify the amount of time spent on her pages because that is her core production — but for some of the shows that time is scarce, and they are still trying to figure out what they have to say to a web audience.“ A lot of the shows just slap up a picture of the host and a lineup, and think that will do something — it's just a brochure, we try and work with them to improve what they're doing online,” she says.
“I don't have to get on producers to keep their sites lively and updated, their audience does that. They're all pretty good at keeping their stuff current, I don't have to hound anybody. We work hard at putting a wrapper around it. We have to brand ourselves, to have one doorway and a consistent look and feel. We must pursue a new media strategy and be prepared for broadband (the coming convergence of broadcast and digital technology with large bandwidth). You've got to think or swim”, says Lawlor.
They are taking the web very seriously now at the CBC, and Executive VP of New Media Lewis knows that the design of the site is pivotal to securing loyal users and growing that user base into the future. “We have regional pages now, which are some of our better stuff I think, that are relevant on a local level- We'll be producing more stuff like that has a more consistent look and gets people the information they want, quickly and personally”, he says. The corporation is preparing for that time, not to far off when the divergent nature of media will be completely blurred — when we'll do searches on our television, and watch movies on the Internet.
“Pretty soon you won't know, nor will it matter, whether you're seeing/hearing web content or television, or what appliance you're using — you won't care, you'll just be using it. We think we're laying down the foundation for that kind of content”, says Lawlor
HOME PAGE — www.cbc.ca — this is where they try to make sense of the enormous amount of content on the site, and for the most part they do an admirable job. The site is navigable from a succinct three part navigation bar along the bottom which provides dropdown selections for almost everything inside, from three obvious cuts at the content: TV, Radio, and Newsworld (the CBC cable specialty channel). The site is also navigable by region and service (Radio Canada Intl. for example) from a another navigation area on the left. This page employs the portal concept allowing the user to customize the current headlines and interesting features they want to see.
CBC4KIDS — www.cbc4kids.ca — Created by Toronto web design firm Biographix, this whimsical creation for children has a CDRom like interface that will be familiar to game playing youngsters. The site is a tad heavy on graphics (making it a little sluggish downloading) — but the primary colour design and strong layouts make it perfect for its target audience. Games, contests and discussion areas provide interactivity. The site window is launched by Javascript code which controls the dimensions of the screen, and locks the layout in a full bleed controlled area.
INFOCULTURE — www.infoculture.cbc.ca — Created in-house by CBC. new media employees Tessa Sproule and Jason Cliff, this cultural magazine supports a clean interface, and strong writing and opinion pieces — in the ironically detached and sometimes jaundiced GenX style (e.g. Julia Roberts' armpit hair cause celebre, or Hitler stealing Bugs Bunny's techniques for propaganda). Sproule sifts through the vast amount of content available from the mother-ship, and the web at large, and presents those stories which have a certain feel and tone — they also assign and create new content. The site evolves daily, and provides a tasty selective slice of the hipper aspects of the CBC — Sproule describes the site ethos, “you can be ironic, and wear blue nailpolish on the weekends”.
NEWSWORLD — www.newsworld.cbc.ca — CBC4KIDS got you from a toddler to a teen, and Infoculture satiated your disaffected salad days. Newsworld is for the sober adult take on the issues and happenings of the day. Sharp in design, with plenty of whitespace evoking a reasoned meticulous and selective slice of current affairs — as well deep in content — this is a stellar Canadian news portal. Discussion areas and posted viewer feedback foster interactivity, and a welcome “print” and “E-mail this to a friend” features add to solid functionality. Throw in streaming video of today's news, and Rex Murphy monologues, and you've got a strong Canadian web presence.
Couldn't resist putting this in. It was playoffs when this was written — this shot didn't make it into the magazine.
