So … notice anything new?
For the last few months, the INDY has been working on a project to overhaul our website from the ground up: a new content management system, new fonts, a new layout, a new tagging system, new categorization, a new calendar, new everything.
And now, dear reader, it’s finally done.
Or, at least, mostly done. Because the day you launch a redesign like this, you’re not actually finished with it. You’re probably 80 percent of the way there. Which is to say, we’ll be working out the kinks and experimenting and figuring out how to optimize performance for weeks, maybe months, to come. (If you see something weird, please email me.)
But ready or not, come hell or high water, this baby was going live October 1. Hope you like it.
We had two fundamental reasons for this undertaking.
The first was aesthetic. The old indyweek.com was clunky and, visually, about a decade out of date. The new design, which we developed with our partners at Metro Publishing, is cleaner, sleeker, sexier even. There’s white space and modern typefaces. It’s more structurally coherent and navigable. In short, it should be easier to find what you’re looking for and easier to read once you get there. And, not for nothing, the ads should pop out more without looking like clutter, which is beneficial for both readers and advertisers.
The second was pragmatic. Our old website didn’t have what’s called responsive design, which could make reading our stories on your phone a little screwy. This one does. About half of our traffic comes through mobile, so that’s a pretty big deal. More traffic not only means more people reading our journalism, but it also means more revenue, which allows us to do more journalism.
The biggest change for us—though probably not for you—is that we’ve eliminated the distinction between “stories” and “blogs,” terms that were more meaningful a decade ago than they are now. Without getting technical, this will allow us to better stay on top of the news cycle and publish stories when they’re ready, rather than when our print schedule allows.
On our homepage, you might notice a few things have disappeared: the story slider, the “Most Read” scroll, and the blogroll, for starters. In their place, you’ll find a main story, two other highlighted stories on the left, and a scroll to the right showing our most recent articles. Below that, you’ll find our paper’s sections—News, Food & Drink, Music, and Arts & Culture—our guides to the Triangle, which draw from our glossy magazines and special sections, and then our calendars.
One thing you won’t be able to do—at least right now—is comment on our stories. (In addition, the comments from our old website disappeared during our content migration.) This is unfortunate. We want readers’ feedback.
But our old comments system was problematic: It was inundated with spam that we spent way too much time cleaning up. More important, we want to create a system free of anonymity, where ad hominem attacks can’t be leveled from behind a pseudonym, and where commenters’ accounts are tied to real identities.
We’re still looking for the best way to make that happen. With any luck, we’ll find something soon. For now, though, please comment on our Facebook page or Twitter feed, or just do it the old-fashioned way and send an email to backtalk@indyweek.com.
