On Tuesday, April 20, The Eagle-Tribune switched to a new website platform. Below are some commonly asked questions and answers to them. As we continue to move forward with improving your local news site we hope you’ll give us your constructive feedback to help guide us as we continue to work at building a better experience for you at eagletribune.com.
Why did the Eagle-Tribune change its website?
The Eagle-Tribune’s parent company Community Newspaper Holidings, Inc. announced last year that it would be upgrading to a new content management system. The one we had been using was older and limited what we could provide readers on the web. Whenever we’d talk about adding features or improving our web product, we’d hit a brick wall in the old system. Change was needed. Coverting to a new system, however, meant rebuilding the site from the ground up. Community Newspaper Holdings rolled out a new template for each of its papers to build their sites on. You can check out the company’s other sites here. Using that as a starting point, we began customizing the site to serve our own readers and the type of local journalism you depend on us for. Starting from scratch means we’ve been able to improve some things right off the bat over the old site — photos are larger and you’ll find more of them, for instance. Also, our new site loads and runs faster than our old one. We hope to continue to improve that performance. Other features we will continue to develop and improve as we move forward. Ultimately we believe this will lead to a better experience for our web readers and we hope you’ll continue to let us know what we can do better.
How do I find my local news?
When you first log onto the homepage you’ll see the top news stories from our coverage area. News on the site is categorized on the navigation bar on the left-hand side of the site. If you click on Merrimack Valley, you’ll get all of the local news stories for Lawrence, Methuen and the Andovers. Click on Haverhill and you’ll get all of the stories for Haverhill, etc. One of the things we’ve added is our “Latest News” feature at the top of the homepage, which — as it implies — lists the latest stories we’ve published online in chronilogical order. So, whether you’re browsing stories by city or looking for the most recent news, it’s all one click away.
I don’t visit your site every day, but I don’t want to miss a big story. How can I be alerted if something big happens?
We live in a pretty fast-paced world and if you’re like me, you don’t have time to stay on top of everything. The Eagle-Tribune is committed, however, to bringing the news to you where you want it. Of course print and online are offered, but you can also stay in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter and through Eagle-Tribune text alerts.
When I login to comment on a story, it doesn’t stay logged in. Why is this?
This is an issue we’ve experienced before with Disqus — the third party provider we use as our commenting system. Disqus allows us to monitor our comment sections and — very importantly — allows you to flag inappropriate comments for our review. We think Disqus has resloved this. I’ve commented on the site using IE, Firefox and Google Chrome and can’t duplicate the problem, but if you are still having this issue, please let us know so we can work with Disqus to resolve it.We do think having people register fosters better commenting practices, but it should be an easy process.
Is the site done?
We have many continued improvements planned for the coming months as we continue to dig into this new system. The site should continue to look cleaner and the sections will be designed to allow you to find what you’re looking for even more quickly. One of our priorities is getting the story view to integrate more easily with the comment feature, photos and videos — we think we can make it look better.
On my computer, the site doens’t seem to function correctly, why is that?
Designing a website is made complicated by the fact that people come to the web from many different browsers. The new Eagle-Tribune site has been designed and tested to function properly on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome, among others. We had some issues at launch with the site not displaying or functioning correctly on older versions of Internet Explorer — specifically IE6 and IE7. We believe we’ve resolved most if not all of these issues now. If you’re an Internet Explorer user using an older version, you can upgrade here for optimal performace, but it shouldn’t be necessary in order to use the site. I’m going to throw in my own bias here and recommend trying Google Chrome. I was a Firefox user until last year when I switched over and haven’t looked back. It’s clean, intuitive and is much faster than either Firefox or IE.
When I use the search on the site some of the stories come up as not found. Where did they go?
The Eagle-Tribune site uses Google for it’s search engine. Google has proven itself to have a fairly good search function in terms of indexing sites. In converting the thousands upon thousands of stories from our old site to the new site, however, there are cases where some stories did not transfer over. In those cases, the story may come up as not found. If you find one, please provide us with the link so we can make sure those stories are converted to the new system. We’re also currently looking to improve the search function by adding the ability to search by date, relavance or within a given time period.
Can I get an RSS feed of your site or sections?
We are working on adding this to the site and should be implementing it soon.
Noah R. Bombard is the new media editor for The Eagle-Tribune in North Andover. He is a former award-winning newspaper and magazine editor who has been covering news in Massachusetts since 1997.