SITTING in San Francisco airport in August 2007, my heart skipped a beat with excitement as I got the sms: Fin24 had gone live and all was okay. As I’ve come to realize, site relaunches never go completely ‘okay’, but three years ago, the relaunch of Fin24 announced a new standard of quality in financial online news in South Africa. To our minds, there wasn’t much the site didn’t have; certainly, it was the country’s market leader.
The general look of the site was clean and unambiguous: just the kind of environment a reader seeking clear, explanatory financial news would expect to see.
In addition, we provided data and a range of subscription based products that catered to the needs of more sophisticated users. To top it all, we embarked on a mission to provide original financial content.
In the world of digital publishing, however, nothing stands still. As a result, Fin24 has embarked on a fresh wave of site improvements, the aim of which we believe will entrench the site’s leadership position whilst enshrining the values of its original relaunch mentioned above.
Step one in the first of a string of upgrades and advances is to give more ‘ta da’ value to our original content. Hence our eye-catching picture bylines and images above the menu bar. And, of course, there’s our title name, brand, or logo if you will, first published (quietly) last month and which reflects the accents played out throughout the rest of the site. It’s a slick design and unfussy.
Next is the menu bar. It has been reorganised into a more rational, logical order. Hence the Companies section ‘drop down’ is on a by sector basis making search more navigable. The same can be said for the Economy section which is divided quite simply into South Africa, international and Africa sections.
Special place is also given to our newly launched Entrepreneurs section in our menu bar which focuses on the SME sector.
Just below the menu bar is our new ticker bar which provides 15 minute delayed financial data, such as stock prices and the currency crosses but in a far more comprehensive manner than the fixed data box that preceded it. Impressively, the ticker is played through every landing and article page so keeping up-to-date with the latest financial information while browsing other data or articles in the site is a cinch. More on financial data later suffice to say this couldn't be brought to you except through the excellent service and focus of our stablemate data provider, McGregorBFA with whom we have long partnered.
Step two is our search function. Way more powerful than its predecessor, searching for information on Fin24 is now more a question of discovery. A single search for Anglo American, as sampled in the screen grab below, provides a choice of share price data or recent content published within Fin24’s environment.
Returning to our new data offering, check out the Markets pages which, from our research on Google Analytics, shows to be the second most visited landing page of the site. From the markets landing page, readers can by means of a simple mouse-over of the tabbed top section get a snapshot of what’s happening in the equities market, the currencies, commodities, funds and international markets while absorbing the top markets news of the day. See the example below.
We’ve also done so catch up. So included in the home page is a summary of Fin24’s most read articles, the most emailed and the most commented articles which is standard on many other sites.
The good news is this is just the beginning even though the process has been underway for a little while. To this end, users may have noticed the improvements to the company snap shot page where hovering your mouse over the share graph also provides relevant news that may have been instrumental in directing the share price.
But in the latest revamp of Fin24, the company snap shot page has received a complete makeover. In addition to standard information on the company share price, Fin24 and McGregor BFA have provided peer group comparisons.
And since we know that traders and market watchers love to chat, there’s a capability to discuss share price information in a comments section. The comments can also be rated and sorted accordingly.
As I mentioned, this is only the beginning of a wave of technical advances Fin24 users will enjoy. As a taste of things to come, we’re upgrading much of the markets data of which just one example is a revamp of the all important Stock Exchange News Service (Sens) page. It's just one of many future deployments we've got planned.
We hope you enjoy Fin24’s improved offering. It’s certainly been long in the making but now that the process has started, expect a steady stream of regular and incremental changes.
This incremental approach to site improvement also means we can respond to user/reader requests. That’s an open invitation to all visitors to tell us what else you’d like to see on the site, and what you might want changed.
DavidM@finmedia24.com