If you missed the short and very informative artice by Whitney Pastorek ” A Better TV Website in Just Four Easy Steps” in Entertainment Weekly (11.7.08) pg 81, you should check it out. For a very long time TV stations have been very bad at understanding this aspect, and today with so many watching missed or re-watching their favorite episodes online, this has become a major if not primary marketing means for every TV show.
Whittney dose a great job an attacks the sites from a web designer/developer angle as well as the end users in writing a very detailed but entertaining article. He four steps are:
1. Have a clean design.
2. Play to the fans.
3. Take content cues from your show.
4. Bonus features should be, you know, a bonus.
Perfectly outlined an clear if you ask me!!
A great example of this along with the examples he stated was the two sites that support Jericho. Not only were there lots of goodies and some good design work put into the site, but you were left craving the weekly additions and teasers not seen on TV. They also ran a second entirely different site that played on a supportive almost second mini-series, and educated the viewer on the realities of national defense, keys on what to do if it really happened, and insight to related truths and thus dispelling misconceptions.
The result was, when they first canceled the show hoards, and I mean hoards of views launched a campaign that got the show back on the air. Sadly, the director and writers failed to keep us after the delay ( the writers strike did not help). Even after the second canceling of the show, their still remains a heavy set of viewer blogs and a grass root effort to see the rumors of a movie come true.
To se articvle online: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20237217,00.html
