I’m a huge pop-culture fan, and one of my favorite ways to spend (or waste, depending on your point of view) an hour is checking out updates on TelevisionWithoutPity (www.televisionwithoutpity.com), a website dedicated to, well, television. It features a host of cool things: show recaps, forums, blogs, and interactive challenges.
When logging onto the site, my initial reactions are that it’s colorful and well-organized. At the top of the page is a horizontal navigation bar with links to major page categories (show pages, forums) and two pull-down menus with basically the same purpose. You can always navigate to the TWoP homepage by clicking the logo banner.
The most recent updates are right under the navigation, so you can easily find information on shows that either aired the night before or have new recaps listed. A more extensive list can be found by scrolling down. (If I have one issue with the site, it’s that it’s incredibly scroll-dependent. But seeing as though it’s basically a very complex blog, it’s hard to avoid.)
Clicking on one of the updates will take you to either a recap (a full-length review of the episode) or a “recaplet” (a brief summary). On those pages, you can also connect to a more extensive list of episodes on the show’s individual page or to the show’s forum. You can “grade” the episode, too.
I’ve followed this site for about five years, and its navigation has improved tremendously. With such a content-heavy site, finding links and pressing the “Back” button eight times got tedious before they added the pull-downs and seperate links to each page of the recaps (they sometimes run up to 20 pages, so having to hit “Forward” and “Back” that many times was a real chore). As for design, the layout is serviceable for its purpose, and the background is subtle enough for the graphics and thumbnails to pop. If you really want to explore the site, register for the forums and find another great way to kill a few hours–chatting with other TV fans about your favorite shows.
2 Comments
February 9, 2008 at 7:30 pm
I went to this site and lost myself in the wonderful Greys Anatomy. One of my closest friends watched this show religiously and recommended it to me. So I rented the season one and two DVD’s last summer and watched them. I loved it! I find myself way too busy these days to watch television so this is a great site to add to my RSS to catch up on what I have missed. I was reading so long that almost forgot I was suppose to blog about it.
The website was very easy to use and add the RSS. It is not too pretty to look at but it is very functional. The scrolling is unavoidable. But you want to know what happened next on the show so you don’t mind scrolling to get to the juicy details. I agree that the site is well organized and user friendly. Kudos to television without pity.
February 11, 2008 at 5:18 pm
I understand that scrolling is inevitable due to the volume of articles they have, but I think it could be easier to navigate. I would suggest that the site add a navigation system in which you choose the letter that the show title starts with and then it takes you to that part of the page. I think that this would help a lot. But other than that the site is very informative.