New website - your feedback, our answers

It’s been about 48 hours since we launched the new newsobserver.com site. Two usability tests, countless hours of development and debugging time, and a lot of general site setup went into it, and we’re still fine-tuning and doing some cleanup.

Thanks to all of you who have given us feedback, either on the “Welcome” story or in our new site feedback system. Some of you really like the new design and functionality (thanks!). Of the complaints we got, most of them fell into a few broad categories. Here are those categories and our responses:

1. "Comments are on a separate tab. "
We had a lot of complaints about the previous site when you paged through the comments – the story still appeared at the top of the page, and you had to scroll WAY down to see the next page of comments. With all the comments on a separate tab, you can easily see them if that's what you're interested in. The most recent comment still appears on the story page itself, though.

2. "The news grid isn’t very useful."
Well, you don’t HAVE to use it… If you don’t do anything, you still get local news, sports and entertainment headlines showing up in that area, just like on the previous site.

3. "Where are all the stories/blogs/headlines?"
We made the site more readable by slimming down the content on the home page, increasing the font size, and adding more empty space. This lets us call attention to the stories we think are important. If you’re a news junkie, and want to see a lot of headlines, try adding more categories to the news grid –it’s quick, you only have to do it once, and you get exactly the page you want to see.

Open question: would it help to be able to add your favorite blog to the news grid?

4. "I can’t log in to the blogs site."
Sorry about that – it was one of those things that happens when you move a big domain like newsobserver.com to a new server. It’s fixed now.

5. "Why does the story page keep refreshing and blinking??"
Sorry about that, too. It was just a server configuration problem.  NOT a plot to show you more ads.

Please keep commenting and giving us feedback – positive or negative, it makes the site better. 

(Oh, by the way - our plot to show you more ads is actually on the photo gallery pages – now, you get a new ad each time you click to a new photo. ;-)