The Sacramento Bee launch a completely retooled website this morning, combining clean and efficient design with a robust set of new features. Commenting and forums are greatly enhanced, including opportunity for readers to create profile pages and start their own blogs. Photo and video galleries have new prominence, and navigation is enchanced several ways, including lists of "most viewed" and "most commented."
Pages are also wider, which makes me happy because it ensures better display of one of my favirote secitons, The Frame, displaying outstanding photography from the Bee and elswewhere. Here was a favorite from today's line-up:
Mel Melcon / LA Times
I got an email about the new site, but, but, but it wouldn't load. Startup pains?
ReplyDeleteIt's been working fine for me, although some of the galleries were slow to load. You tried lately?
ReplyDeleteHoward,
ReplyDeleteI do like the new Sacbee.com, though I don't find it any more or less impressive than many other redesign launches outside the "big" MNI papers that seem to get the ink here. Bellingham, Macon and Biloxi quickly come to mind.
In fact, I would contend that improved Web sites in the smaller markets have larger impacts on those communities than those by the big guys.
For example: The Bellingham Herald has almost no local competition (no TV, no alt weeklies, etc.). The closest competition is The Western Front, an award-winning twice-weekly published by Western Washington University, home to the finest journalism program in the Pacific Northwest.
Thus, the news content and social networking tools provided by a newspaper Web site such as Bellingham's much more directly affects its community than Miami and Sac, which have a lot more media noise with which to contend.
Here's to the little guys, too!
The comment order is backwards from what it should be - they're most-recent-first, plus the "submit comment" form is above the comments, which says (in newspaper site design body language) "don't bother reading the community's comments before submitting yours" - and if those at the paper have this view of the community conversation's quality, they're probably right - and they'll stay right.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I accidentally hit "recommend" for a story - I'd thought I was choosing to only see recommended comments - but didn't see a way to Undo it.
...but it is nice to be able to see more than 2 lines of a comment.
ReplyDelete