ContentIt seems that editors of W3 had decided that they will touch every aspect of a contemporary woman's life. That is why the content of W3 is talking about beauty, home, recipe, fashion, health, bollywood, investment, real estate, trends, food, society, family, love, sex, relationships, travel… and what not… (huff… looking at the wide range they have tried to covered, I think they should have named it- “What women don’t want”).
On one hand it sounds very impressive that each single issue is covering such a wide range of content, but on the other side, it looks like a mess of variety of article. They must have tried to hook their TG reader in at least one or another article, but it clearly shows the lack of editorial direction to remain W3 focused. Apart from the main content of the magazine, regular extra columns are also their like jokes, horoscope, Gossip & top of that Poet’s corner!
Entire issue is divided (rather badly structured) into various sections which are carrying a couple of mediocre articles on the same topic. Entire issue looks more or less a compilation of various articles picked from any color supplement of a local newspaper. To distinguish each section from the other, a section cover before every section is put which again shows their lack of presentation. Selection & the language of the articles also fails to hook the reader into the magazine.
Design
As poor as content... Even the basics of design and layouts are kept aside while making of W3, that is all I can say about the design. Even a good photograph for the cover is not executed properly to make it a great cover. There seems no clarity in thoughts of putting cover stories & other elements to make it more newsstand friendly cover. Even the master head of W3 looks like very immature.
Inner pages are also designed badly & layouts have lots of basic flaws & inconsistencies. Fine, inconsistencies could be taken care if things were correct in first place. Even the basic grid for a regular page is not defined. On some pages it is three columns layout and on some pages lines of text are running across the page. Sometimes it right justified, sometimes it full or left or even centre aligned!! Type faces are also clashing for body & box elements. No consistency is maintained for text to be wrapped around the pictures. Pictures are not shot exclusively for the articles, but are taken from web or stock only. That is why most of the articles have non-Indian faces in their pictures.
Printing
Printing is not that bad I can say, but pre press work is pathetic. It seems that not even a single image is corrected before sending it to print. Since most of the pictures are taken from web or stock, the pictures are printed pixelated and over stretched.
Product
This 100 page monthly magazine is priced at Rs.30 which does not look too much as a cover price. But once you go through the issue, lower quality of paper used, average quality of printing (due to pre-press) and top of that, the disoriented content makes this product a substandard product.
Generally, people think that it is very is easy to create the content around general interests to make wider TG and also the wider scope to get advertisers in, but it becomes most difficult to manage the quality of that kind of content. Content planners must be extremely careful for selecting the topics & the articles which need to be carry. And then how they should be presented is also equally critical. As a conclusion all I can say is that W3 fails to serve "what women want".
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