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Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Finally!
If you check out the Seven Days website today, you'll notice some big changes. My favorite new feature is the flash thingy on the top of the home page called "Top 10."
Our web team basically designed the site. A Drupal programmer built it. I've been tinkering with the content end of it for ages (we imported all of our archives from Typo 3 into Drupal, which was a painful, painful process), and have been working pretty much non-stop for the past month.
Which is why I neglected my poor blog.
Thanks for your patience. Hope you like the site! Let us know what you think, either by commenting on my blog here, or by taking our feedback survey on SurveyMonkey.
We'll have more to show you in a few months or so.
November 14, 2007 at 12:25 PM in House Rules | Permalink
Comments
Love the top 10 slide-show! I also appreciate how visual the new look is, right down to the text. That's the way websites should be--even for a newspaper. Good work!
Posted by: Penelope | Nov 14, 2007 7:02:36 PM
Wow, I'm in awe of the amount of work that went into the site architecture, data management, and design. Everyone involved should feel very, very proud.
Things I love:
- CSS layout. Seems to improve page delivery speed, and it should make future iterations of site design changes easier.
- RSS feeds everywhere.
- New search engine. Let me search by author? And date? And it works? Big ups.
- Most popular sidebar. I'm a sucker for this on NYT.com, and I'm glad to see it here.
Need some QC:
- There's a significant architectural issue that isn't appropriate for me to write about here, but I'm emailing you about it.
- http://www.sevendaysvt.com/food.html. Currently all the links in the "taste tests" section are 404ing on me. They're just pointing to the wrong directory, e.g., the "Bueno y Sano" link's pointed to...
http://7dvt.com/drupal/food/2007/taste-test-bueno-y-sano
..., but it looks as though it should be going to:
http://7dvt.com/2007/taste-test-bueno-y-sano
There's so much to explore that I can't possibly do the site justice at the moment. Suffice it to say that it looks and (for the most part) works great, it's a tremendous achievement for all concerned.
Posted by: Nato | Nov 15, 2007 2:54:32 AM
Thanks!
Nato: I fixed the food links. No more 404ing.
Those are tricky. We actually have to manually code in the links on the landing pages right now, which is really annoying (the landing pages are still in Typo 3). Once we move everything (in a few months, I think), that problem will disappear.
Thanks for your email, too.
Most people seem to like the site so far. I like the look, and the added functionality (and that little flash slideshow), but I think the most important thing we did was to make our archives really searchable. I'm going back through and tagging all of our old content, and it's letting us connect stuff in a way that was impossible before. It's pretty amazing.
I can't wait until we've got it all in there, though that will be quite a project, since the first several years of issues are not even digitized. Ugh.
Posted by: Cathy Resmer | Nov 15, 2007 8:57:54 AM
Looks horrible in Safari 3.0 ;) But I completed the survey and told them so.
Posted by: scully | Nov 15, 2007 11:41:23 AM
Congrats Cathy and Don and Bob and all. Lots of hard work paid off big time. It is stunning - so fresh and clean and WOW, look at that Multimedia page. Happy day!
Posted by: Eva | Nov 16, 2007 12:11:39 AM
We are so close to 2008, and you are doing a redesign -- isn't it time to use 'readable' urls?
Bottom of the page --
Advertising = http://sevendaysvt.com/index.php?id=179
Website FAQ = http://sevendaysvt.com/index.php?id=9206
Jernigan Pontiac = http://7dvt.com/searchindex?filter1=6441
Vs.. CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/11/18/electronics.trash.ap/index.html
Pretty static URL. Makes complete sense, though long winded. Good for archiving purposes..
Compared to:
http://7dvt.com/2007/talkin-trash
http://7dvt.com/2007/hot-stuff
http://7dvt.com/2007/euro-out-euro-0
If your going to make a 'big change' in this day in age.. why not keep things nice and internets friendly!
Posted by: Stan Brinkerhoff | Nov 18, 2007 1:50:34 PM
Yeah, we know, the URLs are clunky.
They're going to change when we switch everything over to drupal. Right now, half of our site is still housed in Typo3, because we haven't finished building it. Those URLS will change in the not-too-distant future.
Posted by: Cathy Resmer | Nov 19, 2007 9:19:20 AM
Hmm... I'm not fond of things that flicker and move. Flash uses up processing power and bandwidth as well as being distracting. Thus I run with plugins turned off. The web is much more readable that way.
Posted by: Walter Jeffries | Nov 19, 2007 3:50:17 PM
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