Welcome to our new Web site
After months of planning and preparation, our new Web site is up and running. We hope you'll find it more attractive and easier to use than the old site.
The site will emphasize local breaking news and photos and we will also post major breaking Associated Press news stories from the state, nation and world. Over time, we have a lot of other plans for interesting content that we hope will have you coming back frequently and spending some time while you're here.
We also want this to be a place where users interact with us and one another. More stories will be open for comments, we'll have a Twitter feed from our Twitter users and we'll have some interesting blogs coming up.
You'll notice some differences in content from the old site, which will evolve over the next several weeks to become distinct from the newspaper.
For instance, we are no longer posting letters to the editor, which will be exclusive to the print edition, although we will continue to post editorials that appear in the paper.
There also will be some differences in our prep sports offerings on the Web site. We'll continue to post stories about prep events, but the schedules, stats and scores that we carried on the old site will not be available right away. We hope to have a much improved prep presentation on the Web site by the start of the next school year.
We will continue to publish obituaries that run in the paper on the Web site.
We plan to use this blog each day to answer your questions about coverage in our newspaper and our Web site, to discuss journalistic issues and to tell you what's coming up in the next day's newspaper. I'll enlist our other editors whenever an issue arises in their area.
Poke around on the site and let us know what you think.
"After months of planning and preparation, our new Web site is up and running. We hope you'll find it more attractive and easier to use than the old site."
Your new website is both less attractive and more difficult to use than your old website.
The fact that you've broken all links to your old content is inexcusable. The content organization is difficult to comprehend (Editorials are under "Community?"), lots of functionality is missing or broken. Your RSS feeds are all broken. You're providing less content than before.
I am a NG subscriber and user, and a local blogger. I want the NG to succeed because I think the service you provide is valuable to our community. But this new website is a step backwards and a tremendous disappointment to me. I wish you had solicited users input prior to the redesign, and I wish you had allowed us to help you with testing. I am afraid now that now, in an effort to safe face, you will dig in your heels on your mistakes and claim they're irreparable or were design decisions.
Good luck, but I think you could have done so much better.
I gave Mr. Foreman suggestions on what makes a great newspaper website. I gave him examples. This appears to be the result of a HS journalism class webmaking effort. The old website was awful. This is even worse. Sorta like New coke vs old coke. The new and improved isnt or wasnt.
Thanks for your comments. We will be working to fix the bugs that people point out to us as well as to develop a lot of new features. Over time, the content of the paper and the Web site will increasingly diverge, which is why the letters to the editor are not posted now. I think you will find it easier to navigate and more attractive than the old site.
I'm very frustrated that I can no longer search stories that appeared on a certain date (when I tried, I ended up not only with the stories but all of the classifieds as well), and also that only one page of local stories comes up. I'm sure your staff worked very hard on this, but from a viewer's perspective it seems very visually cluttered, less user-friendly and harder to navigate. I'm also very disappointed that letters to editor are no longer offered online. This site used to be one of my favorite go-to sites; unfortunately, since this change was made, I find myself seeking out other news sites instead.
The Bill Wyman op-ed in the Wall St. Journal today has much wisdom and many implications for the recent redesign. I am a print subscriber and I use your website to get news. The new approach is harder to navigate and does not provide any way for me, as a paying customer, to keep up with the paper when I travel. This is frustrating. I want very much for our locally-owned paper to thrive. This doesn't feel like a step to that end, especially for those of us with hybrid connections--paper and web. All best wishes for it working; there's nothing I'd like more than to be wrong and to be having a personal, idiosyncratic, off-base reaction.
The look is great and all the new categories, buttons and drop-downs awesome, however not the easiest to navigate. Hopefully after another couple of months; once the site has been tweaked, and we become more acclimated, the site will be the best.
Who would know, "letters to the editor" are only available behind the pay-wall? It is not explained or pointed-out anywhere on the site! And to be even more direct, I have been following the NG online for as long as you have been posting and I never knew the old site offered the full version of the daily paper online.
If you really want to move into the 21st century then the marketing department must also move forward. When I called for the "four-week-free green trial offer" the CSR in circulation stated that offer was only available for home delivery. I either read the promotion wrong, or the circulation department is following a different script. Btw: Shurrell who usually is on top of everything, in that department must have been off, or away from her phone that day.
Thanks for moving forward and thanks for providing all that you do for your online readers.!
Please tell me that the dated classifieds (ie, garage sales, estate sales) aren't going to be grouped into one continous string irrelevant of the dates, forcing us to sift through which are current and which are old? I already see one from a week ago mixed in with this weekends.
Anton -- We hope to have soon a new "green edition" available for print subscribers that will allow them to see the entire contents of the newspaper online. We'll also sell green edition subscriptions to those who only wish to read the paper online. The new green edition will be an improvement over the PDF version we now post online to those who subscribe to it.
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