September 8, 2009 - 12:39pm
Explaining the new look
BY GARY GRACA
Welcome to the new michigandaily.com. We spent the last seven months or so working on a new design, some new features and a new online philosophy that we are excited to finally bring to you.
Let me start, though, by backtracking a little bit.
A little over a year ago, the Daily took a monumental step in its online history. Having chosen not to renew our contract with Viacom's College Publisher, a content management system for college newspapers, we built our own content management system on the open-source software Drupal. For the first time in the newspaper's history, we began owning and managing every aspect of our website.
Fewer site outages, easier updates, quicker load times and a much more convenient and accountable way to organize our content came with that switch. But most importantly, the Daily gained the freedom to do whatever we wanted with the site.
Readers may have noticed glimpses of that new freedom throughout the past year. Stories have gone up online sooner, since we can more easily update the site and since we changed our workflow so that of our editing is done on the site. Multimedia pieces have began showing up across site, since we finally got the ability to easily post video and slideshows. And the site's ads, once dominated by national advertisers because College Publisher sold them for us, became more local (and hopefully more pertinent to our readers' lives).
The look didn't change much, though, even as everything behind it changed dramatically.
And we outgrew the old look pretty quickly. As we added more features, we often just grafted them on to the site, leaving them minimally accessible and not fully integrated.
Besides that fact, a lot of us were itching for an overhaul, too — something to show everyone that things were changing as much as they are. In my opinion, we have a simple, clean and impressively designed print edition. The same couldn't be said for the old website.
Which brings us to the new look.
We hoped first to give readers a new, fresh look. The color palette has changed; the fonts have changed; and some of the visual organization has changed. All of that should immediately give everyone a different experience on the site.
Beyond that, we hoped to streamline navigation on the site. To that end, we added links to most of our informational pages like our About and Contact pages at the top of the site, revised the main menu bar links (separating the editorial and business links by color), built a second menu bar for sections and added a complete site map in the footer. We want things to be easily found from almost every page on the site.
We also want readers to stay on the site and explore. The old site didn't pull you in and make you stay. It let you check the latest headlines that might interest you and take off.
I hope that's not the case anymore.
We dramatically expanded the number of section pages readers can visit, adding multiple subsections for each major section. We added a new system of topic pages that will grow into encyclopedic resources about the University of Michigan. We added a cut-out box to article pages that features more photos, links to related articles, polls, video and a host of other features. We brought the blogs off of their previous home on WordPress and gave them a much-needed facelift. The list goes on. And a lot more is in the works.
So explore the site. Tell us what you like and what you hate. Help us fix what is broken. Be patient while we fix it. And most of it, enjoy it and turn it t when you need the latest information about Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan.
