Our new homepage redesign
By BdotCOM
As you may have noticed, we have launched a redesign of our homepage, the first major changes in quite a while.
Our goals were to clean up a page that had grown too dense and covered with too many bandages, make more money and do more to promote our growing network of local websites.
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News and advertising from The Bakersfield Californian remains a core part of our mission online, but we’re offering so much more that demands greater awareness. So, think of the new bakersfield.com as a place of discovery that will take you where you want to go.
Some highlights:
- The page is wider. We’ve increased the width from 968 to 1152 pixels to better match screen resolutions of the large majority of our users and add more white space so the overall design can “breathe.”
- We’ve built the page using “drag and drop” widgets that give us great flexibility to adjust the content mix on short notice to reflect breaking news or content that’s of interest at certain times of day.
- You won’t always see it, but when we post a news alert, we’ll highlight that at the top of the page to make it easy to see important bulletins.
- We’ve added celebrity and health news feeds to reflect demand but will continue to highlight the important local news topics of the day and make it easy to get to our complete news package.
- We’ve added what we call a carousel to promote our growing number of affiliate sites in The Bakersfield.com Network. There’s a lot of great information on each of these sites, and the carousel is a great way to make more people aware of those alternatives.
- More ads: We were regularly sold out of homepage ad spots, so to meet demand, we’ve added some more. Advertising is an important part of our mission – you’re reading this site for free, remember – and we think these new positions will help pay for the content and information you have come to value.
- Individual feeds for popular classified categories.
- At the bottom of the page, we’ve added some elements that make it easier to ask us questions and get answers to your issues, and to submit questions to our regular Ask The Californian feature.
- We’re working with a vendor to launch a new colorful weather icon at the top of the page. With any luck you’ll see that soon. In the meantime it'll be pretty spare.
We’re not stopping with the homepage. We’ll soon launch new looks for our Inside Guide business directory, news blogs and HealthyBakersfield.com, and will begin the hard work behind a major overhaul of our news presentation online. We plan some interim changes to our news pages in the coming weeks but will save a major redesign and launch of a completely separate news site for the second quarter.
We know there will be inevitable bugs with this design, and will work to squash those asap. But let us know if you see anything goofy. We know some people will love these changes and some won’t, so we welcome your thoughts, ideas and constructive criticism.
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