The much anticipated re-launch of www.cnbc.com ocurred yesterday after being offline for over 6 months. As a regular viewer of CNBC and Jim Cramer's Mad Money, I was eager to check it out. The new website focuses heavily on video, which I think is a big mistake. If you want video commentary on the market, you can get that all day long on their cable channel. A finance website should be all about stock news, functional stock charts, detailed company information, and stock input from end users via blogs and bulletin boards. I don't think the new cnbc.com website does any of these very well.
Google Finance, on the other hand, has done a great job of eliminating all of the useless crap and given end users only what they need. They also made their stock charts interactive. If you want more information, you simply drag to adjust the range of the chart. A mouseover will display the date and historical stock price for you, and specific data points are keyed to news stories that affected the market. CNBC did not include any of these useful features in their re-design even though both Google and Yahoo were already doing it.
Where Google Finance displays stock headlines and links to news articles, CNBC decided to display a large advertisement. To make matters worse, most of the ads are Flash-based, causing the pages to load extremely slowly. Unfortunately, CNBC got it wrong by focusing on their bottom line and not the end-user experience. Maybe next time, CNBC. Until you put me first, I'll stick with Google Finance for online stock information.
Horrible CNBC website, straight out of the 1997 school of website design. On my monitor I have to scroll down past a page of ads to get to the news. My eyes hurt just looking at the site. Yuck.
I just stick myself to ChannelNewsAsia instead.
Best Wishes from Geeks' Corner!
PS: Did U know CWS is a Cleaning Company in Singapore and United Kingdom (England)?
Azrin in Gillingham
Rochester-Upon-Medway,Kent
Thanks for visiting Azrin. I did know that CWS was a very large cleaning company in your neck of the woods. They also hold the cws.com domain, which is one reason we're using the more "technical" cws.net version.
Ads? I just looked at it and didn't see any ads that I have to scroll down a page to find anything. I don't know, maybe I'm looking at it wrong or something.
It looks like they haphazardly threw stuff where ever it fit, the page doesn't really flow well if you know what I mean. And oh, the videos don't even display if Firefox I can hear them talking but all I see is black, this is a common problem with Windows media player. They are using so much flash on the site already, why not use it for video.
some good points made. They have 24 hours to do video so why put it onthe website. I guess that sums it up. spot on.
Check out our wallstrip though. Video done entertaining for stocks.