We launched

We launched the redesigned newsobserver.com around 6:30 p.m. Tuesday night.  We were hoping to launch around noon, but we were having some problems with pictures showing up in the photo galleries.

Photo galleries are a really important part of our site, so we didn't want to go with them being flaky.  We were pretty antsy, though, because after months of work, we wanted to get going. Also, as long as we were running our old site and operating the new one in "beta" mode, we were having to maintain two web sites with one staff. One web site is plenty of work by its own self.  Finally, the switch was thrown, metaphorically speaking, and the old site was replaced by the new one.

A couple of minutes after launch, I noticed that the toolbar at the top of the home page wasn't working.  I contacted the techies over at McClatchy Interactive with an urgent message to this effect.  They checked into it and said it was because the toolbar was hard-coded to the old site. They put in a temporary workaround and it was fixed.  I said: Thanks, I was over here having a heart attack. The guy over at MI emailed me back words to the effect: This your first redesign?

Well, yeah. 

His point was that he'd been through a bunch of them, and this one was fairly uneventful. 

Maybe so. Wednesday morning, when I woke up early, I went online and saw that we were having another hiccup. Pages were refreshing after about three seconds, which kind of makes it hard to read them. Others were noticing, and our technology folks figured it out and made the problem go away.  

I have to say that I find a lot to like in the new design.  I like that fact that we can display our photos more prominently at the top of the home page.  That gigando index at the top of the home page, which you can get to by clicking a tab, lets you see where most of the major content categories are.  Our blogs can now be found on related section fronts, instead of being hidden behind a tab on the  home page. Our story pages now look like a human being designed them, instead of a robot.

I can move sections around on the home page to customize it, including showing the numbers of stories that I want to see.  

Our search is also better.  It indexes a lot more content, like the blogs and photos.  There's nothing worse than a bad search engine on your site that brings back garbage. 

All that said, it will take a little time for folks who are accustomed to one way of seeing our site to get used to the new way.  If you have any feedback, you can tell us what you like and what you don't like.  We don't redesign things and cast them in cement. We will be spending probably the next few weeks tweaking stuff, and your ideas are welcome.  You can preface them with: "Dear Incompetent Morons" or "Dear Creative, Hard-Working Folks at the N&O." Either way, we'll listen to what you have to say and if we can make a fix that you want, we will.