Wednesday 21 March 2007

The new Fairfax business site, BusinessDay.com.au has been launched. To promote the Web site, editors have changed the title of the business section in the printed version of The Sydney Morning Herald to BusinessDay.com.au.

It is a fairly flat site. The tabs along the top of the 'page' lead to other Fairfax sites.

News is updated at least hourly, as indicated by the format of the 'Latest News' column, which has subheadings in the form of "01 hour ago", "02 hours ago" and so on. The emphasis is clearly on the freshness of the news they provide.

On the left-hand side of the page is a column that holds the major stories of the day. Under each section, which is only marked by a headline that is also a link, are link-headlines leading to related stories picked from the Fairfax group's major vehicles, including the SMH and The Age.

The title field of the html page has the following text: "15 minute updates on latest Business and Finance news". As I said, freshness is key.

Fairfax evidently wants surfers to visit frequently throughout the day and to make this their major source of business news. As if that needed to be iterated.

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