Escape from Meeting Island!
We had a meeting this morning of most of the people involved with our Web-site redesign to assess feedback (ours and yours) and discuss some of the changes we want to make based on that feedback. As we said, this is a work in progress.
Probably the most notable change will be to the rectangular area now headed "News & Record Multimedia." To address what many of us thought was an insufficient emphasis on the elements of our site that are part of the Town Square initiative, we're going to make that area sort of Town Square Central, with a logo and links to blogs, podcasts, multimedia presentations, and links to where you can read or submit items for YourNews. That last element currently is missing entirely from the home page -- D'OH!!! -- an oversight that was noticed right after the beta site was posted but somehow fell through the cracks during revisions.
We will also be adding a Town Square tab to the row of tabs you see near the top of the page -- News, Sports, Money, etc. Yes, that's redundant, but we figure that where elements of the Town Square are concerned, redundancy is a Good Thing.
Those are the headlines. There also will be some minor design and/or technical tweaks, such as setting up a rotating "Featured Blog" on every subject tab. And, of course, the overall design of many existing pages still has to be changed to conform to the style of the home page. That will be a rolling process for the next several weeks. But the tech folks hope to have all the work on this "punch list," if you will, completed by late August.
The key issue to come out of the meeting for more study and discussion is whether and how to implement registration for people wishing to comment on the blogs. (This has been a hot discussion topic here and elsewhere on our site.) There'll be more to report on this after more discussion takes place.
And, finally, the key question: Yes, the red banner at the top of the page (which, if you'll look carefully, is tied into a red-based color scheme that attaches design elements of that color to parts of the page that we're especially trying to emphasize) is going to stay. I was mentioning this to our brand manager, Ed Williams (whose job, among other things, includes overseeing the additional promotion of the site that we have in the works), and he said, "Better red than dead!" Of course, he has been saying this ever since I've known him, which is 18 years and change now, so I'm not quite sure how much to read into it.
Comments (3)
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While I have no comments regarding the new changes/implementation your site is going through…Like you said it’s a work in process.
But, I was really surprised to see that you decided to roll out the Home page first instead of starting with the article pages and work your way up. Generally if a user can’t find an item on Home or from the start, they’d leave immediately. But, if you work from inside out… slowing introducing the new elements from the Article page on up, you might have a higher success rate in audience retention.
You may have already notice the page viewing rate have really declined since the introduction of the new site.
Posted on July 15, 2005 9:00 AM
That decision was made by our tech folks, and I've asked them what the basis for it was. Of the two people primarily involved at this point, one's out today, so I may or may not get an answer anytime soon. But when I do, I'll post it here.
Posted on July 15, 2005 10:37 AM
Update: Stephen Paschall points out that because we were also switching publishing systems as part of the redesign, proceeding as InF1 suggests would have required building two complete, parallel systems, which wasn't feasible.
Posted on July 15, 2005 1:17 PM