Magazines need websites, but need to understand the differences

Blogger Matthew Gruman publishes some cogent observations about magazine web building in general...

Magazines need websites. Tools like Dreamweaver make it really easy to make websites if you know print design. People with magazines tend to know print design, so they make their own sites. The problem is that web design and print design aren’t the same thing and most people don’t know that. When you really enjoy a website, it’s probably not because it looks good, but because it works. You understand what you need from it, and how to get that; same as a magazine (think about the disconnect when you pick up a magazine without a table of contents). Transferring print technique to the web, while hopefully resulting in beautiful typography and white space, usually is a colossal failure.

[A couple of months ago, Masthead magazine relaunched its website, with a bunch of new features and making virtually all of its content free. That was reported here. (As a regular contributor to the magazine, it didn't seem appropriate for me to "review" the new look.)]

And here is Gruman's specific view about one of the new features of the relaunched mastheadonline:

I don’t read Masthead to discuss what my magazine would be if it was a song; that’s why I read personal blogs. I read Masthead for industry news.