Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Communicating through online media websites
If you take a quick tour of the websites of mainstream luxury and fashion
media, you will likely notice how similar their looks and features are. The
majority have the same sections: trends, style, people, beauty, love, celebrities,
culture, events, videos, blogs, forums and communities and, in some cases,
look topics and style topics, in addition to the usual sections: news, contact,
advertising and home page sections. Upon clicking on any of the sections,
you will likely come upon pages with minimal text and tons of images pre-
sented in flash and static structured forms that often appear in frames includ-
ing feature tools for zoom, slide-shows and control for the videos. A look at
the newspaper websites will show that they mostly have the same design con-
cept, navigational menu structures and text and image layouts. Even the logos
of most are placed at the same spot, and the banner and pop-up adverts appear
in the same way. On the independent online magazine cover, the first thing
you may notice is that they all have black as the main color theme leading to
a uniform array of black backgrounds. Luxury websites, for their own part,
are doing their best to demonstrate the current craze for horizontal naviga-
tion by adopting it on nearly every page, even on websites that have a con-
cept that isn't necessarily enhanced by this feature. Just as luxury brands went
through the fever of black color themes and backgrounds a few years ago,
today everybody seems to be on the bandwagon of horizontal navigation.
Why this level of sameness, you may wonder? One factor that could
explain this is that there is still no real consensus in luxury online communi-
cations and all the parties involved in communicating online have been try-
ing to carve a niche for themselves in the quest to understand the dimensions
and mechanics of online communications.
The online media world is vast. To begin with, there are the mainstream
media websites that have nearly all developed Internet versions where
we currently find luxury adverts in the form of banners, pop-ups and vid-
eos. Then there are the independent online media websites like the e-zines
Luxury Culture, Luxury Design and Luxe-Mag and the TV platforms Luxury
Channel and Luxe.TV, which mostly have rich editorial content but in which
luxury adverts are seldom featured. And then there are the social media web-
sites like YouTube, Facebook and Style Bubble which are powered by citizen
journalists and cyber-residents and feature luxury content in different forms
ranging from adverts placed by both the brands and consumers to videos
uploaded by the brands and those created by consumers themselves to con-
tent generated by the public through discussions and debates.
The power behind these different forms of media is shared by the four prin-
cipal parties in the online communications world - the luxury brands, the main-
stream media, the independent media and the clients. None of these is more
powerful online than the others. The Internet provides them with uniform space
and access to send their message. In the early days of the Internet starting from
