Features

After six weeks of this semester, I am very pleased with the progress features has made. We have at least six regular features giving us constant new and updates features, which is exactly how a publication should be run. Having a regular Tuesday deadline means that we always have new features on the site ready for when the weekly bulletin and news stories are on the site. This is essential for a publication, because, if someone visits the site, in which the content has not been updated then it is very unlikely that they will return.

We are now in the middle of creating a number of restaurant reviews as well as game reviews. To my knowledge we have never had continual reviews before so this is a bringing WINOL to a new level within features especially as we have two different reviews each relating to separate aspects of our audience.

Having a regular comment piece is also a very strong aspect of our features page. Although I would prefer ‘A Diary of a Winchester Lady’ to have it’s own page with all of Poppy’s articles on it. This would be much more effective as we have a cartoon image of her specifically because the comment pieces are all produced by Poppy under the same title. It makes sense from a production point of view to have all of these articles on one page, as it is more direct for our audience when they visit the website.

WINOL Life is really starting to become a valuable asset to WINOL features. Not only does it gives us another production, but it also allows to invite outside guests who are specific to features, in to be on the show. This is a very good opportunity for all the feature writers to gain feedback as well as making WINOL more popular to editors in the area. We have two more episodes of WINOL Life to produce before the end of this semester. For our final episode, we have Maria Milano, Editor of InStyle website, coming in again who will appear on the show. For this show I would like to make it a fashion special due to the background of our guest. It will be very good for the feature writers to stem out and produce a different type of feature than the ones, which are regularly being produced.

In previous years, features have taken a while to ‘take-off’ this year however, the feature writers were all aware of the deadlines they had to meet and have all been very dedicated to producing content each week. Although we do have regular features each week such as, restaurant and games reviews, What’s On and our comment column, this does not mean that features are boring. It means our audience will be aware of the content we produce and will be inclined to visit the website again to see any continual features – such as the reviews.