The first impression that one gets at a glance at alignjournals.com is that it is a specialized site catering mainly to the business community. But a combination of business and internet/web news makes it a little confusing as to the purpose of the site. The top right-hand corner just below the site heading has the customary links to home, about us, contact us, advertising, subscription, and contact us pages. Immediately below are back issues of the site and articles. The home page is divided into five columns. Starting from the left, there is a link to industry news and events. Below is an email subscription window for getting company subscriptions and further down has a link to the site sponsors. The second column is a link to the latest news of the week and below it, what appears to be white papers on business in pdf format. The third column is titled ‘spotlight’, featuring in-depth analysis of topics of relevance, which again can be subscribed to. Some statistics under the head ‘tech stats’ that are related to the internet appears below this. At the bottom of this column are two podcasts, one related to the internet and the other to business. The fourth column is dedicated to industry news and the last one is an advertisement. (New this week. 2008).
Look and feel: The style is traditional and has an almost staid look and the site looks a bit cluttered. The background is white. Other colors that are primarily used are grey with a sprinkling of crimson. The most colorful items are the advertisements which thankfully are shown at the top and far-right and not in the middle. The font ‘Verdana’ has grey and black color for text and blue and crimson for links. Size 7.5 is used for headings and 10 for the main parts. Articles open on the same page whereas news items open in
Target Audience: The real purpose of the site is made clear only after clicking on the ‘about us’ link. This site is intended to be a monthly e-magazine that aims at ‘aligning’ business and the internet. So in effect, the primary target audience is business owners, executives, and IT professionals in the business field. It is also useful for students and for those with academic interests in business and the net.
Usefulness: What the site lack in looks, makes up for content. There is a mix of scholarly works, articles, and news that go far back as 2006. Past issues are available only for the years 2008 and 2007. The articles are grouped into business management, business processes, integration, case studies and legacy application spotlight, innovation, SOA. The first four have further subdivisions. For example, a case study is given under the following headings – business services, education, energy, financial services, health care, hospitality, logistics manufacturing, media, technology, transportation, and utilities. To cite one more instance, business management is classified into business intelligence, governance/compliance, and supply chain. What is useful about the site is that it has a wide range of subjects pertaining to business, IT, and a combination of the two. All articles are free to view.
Links visited or intended for visit: To get a general layout of the site, at least one link in each column and category was actually clicked on and the resulting pages read. The most interesting and useful are the white papers. The visited site in this instance (in pdf format) was a white paper about Business Activity Monitoring. It is the intention of the writer to read and study all white papers at a later stage. Only recent news events going back one week were visited, even though news as far back as 2006 is available. Clicking on the link to news opened a page giving a brief write-up of the news.
Below it was a ling inviting the reader to visit the website of the company on whom the news was featured. There is no intention of visiting older news unless there is any specific reason for doing so. The articles link proved to be a slight disappointment because not too many were available. As mentioned earlier so many topics and sub-topics could be seen when the articles link was clicked on. In the heading case studies, most of the sub-classifications did not even have a single article. But whatever was available was very useful and more detailed reading is intended at a later stage. The particular article viewed at the time of this preview was titled ‘Business Intelligence Tells You Why: Moving to a Metrics Based Approach to Running Your Business.
Other Interesting Links: Tech stats were mostly trivia items that turned out to be pages from another website of the company cnet.com. The site was a blog page with heading the ZDNet.com. one item was a survey that states that 60% of Americans are uneasy about personal online activity used by internet companies to market their products. But further visits will be made only if the writer has spare time.
Evaluation: On the whole, the site is useful to its targeted customers. It also appears that this particular site is only in its infancy and as time evolves more and more information will be made available. The site should take care to see that more information in the articles section is provided because clicking on topics and sub-topics just to find that no content is available is both time-consuming and disappointing. Due to the lack of availability of broadband at the time of review, none of the podcasts could be heard. This will soon be looked into as and when it is possible to view the site through a broadband connection. For information purposes, the site was viewed on the 30th of April at 7.pm.
References
New this week. (2008). Align online. Web.