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Sneak peek at new website

Apr 20th, 2010 by Noah R. Bombard

A sneek peek at the new site

A sneek peek at the new site

LINK TO NEW SITE

We at The Eagle-Tribune have been working hard over the past several months on a relaunch of our website. For those of you who have been following us online, you may have noticed a lot of new directions on our web product over the past year or so — live video, live blogs, more video, stories posted throughout the day, etc. Today we plan to launch the next chapter in those efforts.

Why a new site?

Those of us who work on the site have felt — as many of you have — that for a site that delivered so much great local news coverage, our content just wasn’t presented in an easy-to-navigate way. Nor were we really presenting it in a visual way. With this launch, we move to a new platform that will allow us to continue to evolve our web presence. We’re not done. You can expect to see continued improvements over the next several months. We know you expect a lot from us and we’re up for the challenge.

New features

Although we plan to continue to improve our site, there are a few things you’ll find right off the bat that are better:

  • Photos — We’ve got more of the great work our photographers do every day chronicling life in the Merrimack Valley and Southern New Hampshire. You can also see them bigger. Click on a photo in a story and it’ll open up to fill your screen. No more little photos.
  • Navigation — Feel free to delve into the site. The navigation bar will bring you content organized in an easy-to-find way. You can bookmark the news pages that you’re interested in (Merrimack Valley, Haverhill, New Hampshire) if you like.
  • Latest news — In addition to all the stories that were in that morning’s paper, we’ve now got a place right at the top of our site for latest news stories. Here you can find the most recent things we’ve published online — often stories you won’t find in that day’s print edition.
  • Video updates — Those of you who read this blog know I’ve been conversing with you every morning via video on what’s happening in the Eagle-Tribune newsroom each day. You can now find that day’s video right on the homepage. Not a regular visitor? No problem. We’ll continue to send that video out daily via Twitter and Facebook so you won’t miss anything big going on.

Feedback

We’re not done. There’s more coming. But we want your input. What do you like about the new site and what would you like to see us work on?

Posted in News, The Website | View Comments

  • BylliCrayone

    Nice! Waiting for the launch!

  • A long time reader

    Not liking the black side bar–too dreary, not upbeat nor a must go to site. Color. Daily is black and white so this should be colorful and attractive to the eye.

    Like the old site better than the new.

    Just my opinion-not a professional of anything by any means.

  • nhden

    Don't like it……… at all!

  • A Reader

    Looks good! A tiny nitpick — add delimiters ( “|” or “-” or a dot or something) between the site map items at the bottom.

  • EyesOnYou

    Not liking the new format. Difficult to see at a glance. Not easy on the eye. Cramped. Ads outweigh the articles. Set up a poll and see what happens…

  • BadaBing

    love it!

  • http://www.eagletribune.com Noah R. Bombard

    Thanks, Reader. Were trying to see if we can do that. I find it kind of annoying, too.

  • rumbarrel

    I had problems with the new website using IE7
    I downloaded Fire Fox 3.6 and all problems went away.

    Have others experienced issues with IE7?
    Such as the way the comment section displayed and scrolled.

  • TheManOnTheWayUp

    Not a big fan of the re-design, quite honestly. Usability is even more difficult than the old site – it's crowded and too busy: not enough white space. All the link-backs with Disqus are broken for comments posted before the re-design. Older bookmarks are broken as well. Blogs that reference older E-T links are now broken. This is not how it is supposed to be done.

    As someone who does this kind of work for a living, I think the implementation was not thought through and poorly executed. Your web team should have accounted for what to do with older URL links to your site and how to redirect them to the proper resources on the new site, or at least not just smack them in the face with a generic 404 message from the web server.

  • http://www.eagletribune.com Noah R. Bombard

    We had several problems on IE7 before launch and thought we fixed them all. We'll have to take another look at it.

  • http://www.eagletribune.com Noah R. Bombard

    Thanks, WayUp. We're still working on fixing links and those should improve as we go along. We do have redirects setup, but obviously there is content falling through the cracks and we're working on mending those fissures.

    Now that we're on a new platform, we'll actually have the freedom to make improvements to the site we weren't able to do before and we're excited about what we'll be able to do with it in the months to come. Hopefully your concerns will all be met as we continue to improve things. I think they will.

  • MA_Native

    You're probably still working on this — but the side menu does not carry through to all sections as the top menu did under the old format, making it rather annoying to get back to the home page or to another section. For example, if you go to the Obituaries, the menu is no longer there; and the only way to get back to it is to use the browser's back arrow in order to navigate to a different section.

    Also, the comments section is now in a box (something I assume I'll get used to). It looks nice, but the background is too dark and should be lightened a shade or two. I don't object to the shading, but I spend a lot more time reading comments than I do the articles themselves (as I'm sure many others do, as well), and the dark background is harder on the eyes than it ought to be.

    Otherwise, it looks pretty good — just different. I agree with some of the other comments here, but it will take getting used to for most of us.

  • http://www.eagletribune.com Noah R. Bombard

    Thanks, Native. There are a couple of pages that don't have the navigation bar on the left because you're actually hoping over to a different site — for instance, if you click on blogs you hop onto our blog site, which isn't on the main site. Same with obituaries. That being said, you're right, we need to provide an easy way for you to get back. I'll add that to our list of things to work on.

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