Shocker: Local TV station has good-looking Web site

For a medium that thrives on visuals and graphics, local television stations have sure done a miserable job on the Web.

Take Channel 5 (please!). The site is packed with information, and Channel 5 does a great job of quickly posting breaking news, but the home page looks like a head-on collision between two paint trucks and should come with a bottle of extra-strength asipirin. Channel 25? Could somebody tell them frames are so 1997? Now, to be fair, this is hardly unique to Boston - local-TV sites across the country are mediocre at best (in fact, many of them use the same godawful toolbar and throw-everything-on-the-wall design as Channel 5). But still: Ick.

So it's amazing to see the new cbs4boston.com.

The look is clean and simple - but with a bunch of cool features, such as Track It, which lets you build a page of articles using your own keywords. And every page comes with a well integrated, page-specific video window - just what you'd expect from a TV site. The actual content is a bit barebones right now - a search on "Menino" only brings up four hits - but give it time.

To be sure, the site is larded up a bit with extraneous syndicated content (has anybody been dying to read "What's New: Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cosmetic Cases" on a Channel 4 lifestyle page? No, I didn't think so). Better they should ditch the third-party content deals and hire somebody to make sure they're competing with thebostonchannel.com and boston.com on breaking news.

But in general, this is one hella TV news site.

Quck! Find the day's main story on Channel 4 and Channel 5: