Washington Post's website keeps users up to date with new 'Post Alert'

Posted by Helena Humphrey on October 2, 2009 at 2:16 PM

An innovative new system that delivers notifications on breaking news to users of the Washington Post web site was launched last week, Poynter reported.

According to the project's manager, Steven King, editors can now flag up stories of interest throughout the whole site, as well as in particular sections. Browsers of the web site will see the Post Alert immediately, which rises up from the bottom of the browser "like a piece of toast coming out of a toaster," King said.

King indicated that since its launch, the response has been encouraging: The Post tracks the number of users who choose to click through to the links, as well as though who close the alert: Cuurently many more links are being clicked on then not, particularly in the sports and entertainment sections, generating an increased level of traffic through the site.

The front-end developer of the project, Jesse Foltz, created the Post Alerts in JavaScript, using the Prototype and MooTools libraries. Lee Trout, who constructed the back-end using Django admin so that editors can then schedule Alerts. This data is subsequently passed to the JavaScript through a JSON.

So far, so good. The new tool appears to be an simple and effective way to promote the website content, unobtrusive for the user and good example of what news organizations can do to promote content once they have already attracted traffic onto their site. It will now be interesting to see whether other news sites look to adopt a similar system.

Source: Poynter