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It's always a good thing when a new media option broadens our choices for information, and as a fan of hyperlocal news on the web, I have to welcome the new GoLocalProv to the Rhode Island media ecosystem. For a just-launched site, they have a great roster of reporters and columnists, and the stories I've read in the past couple of days have been uniformly well done, with strong images and multimedia elements. The site also works pretty well on an iPhone

But that's where the kudos end. Because this site is a user interface (UI) disaster. The endlessly scrolling text and hyperactive display ads take up enormous screen real estate and give the site the feel of a 2005 MySpace page. Trust me: not a compliment.

And the information architecture (IA) is more than a match for the design. While there are reasonable top-navigation choices (News, Sports, Politics), once you drop into one of these buckets, you are in a linear scrollable list of stories, with no section navigation. Only once you visit a story do you get tag (or keyword) links, and no matter which one I clicked on, it always takes you to an empty page that says "Tags: Tag." For a site with this much display advertising — seven ad blocks on on every page — you would think they might have ironed these things out before launch.

And one final bone to pick: No RSS. Hey, guys, this is 2010. I do not come to your web site to consume content. Your content had bloody well better come to me. I strongly suspect, based on the way the code is written, that they expect a lot of users to repost through Facebook, and that's a fine strategy, but there's just no rational reason for a contemporary site not to have an RSS feed.

And these are not just idle gearhead criticisms: the medium is the message. What you are telling visitors is that your site is dominated by the corporate sponsors so prominently displayed, and that you don't care about how readers want to get their news. That's not a winning strategy in today's digital space.

Update: See the comment thread below. The staff at GoLocal Prov took the time to respond to this review, and fixed a bunch of stuff overnight. That kind of responsiveness makes me a little ashamed of how harsh the review was. You should go check 'em out — we need more pure-play Web news, and the content here is top notch. (And, now that they have an RSS feed, I can track them in Google Reader and don't even see the display ads. Thank you, thank you, thank you.)