
A new look
- 28 Mar 08, 05:55 PM
It’s been a time of even more hectic activity than usual here on the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ News website over the past week or two. Our development and design teams have been putting the finishing touches behind the scenes to a new look for the site which - all being well - we're aiming to launch next week.
For the journalists it's been a period of familiarisation with the changes, and briefings on how it will affect the way they create pages in our content production system.
I'll go into more detail about the changes once you’re able to see them for yourselves, but the new look will include wider pages, bigger images, a new programmes area on the front page and a new pan-ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ masthead.
Overall the idea is to make the whole site even easier to use, creating more room for the content to be easily seen and scanned.
Along with this, as I mentioned previously, we’ve been gradually rolling out a new system for showing video and audio – embedding it within our story pages () so it’s quicker and simpler to access. It’s confined to just some stories for now, and we’ve been assessing how it’s doing.
Early signs suggest that on those stories where we’ve embedded the video in a story, as opposed to providing the link to a pop-up player as we've done up to now, the video gets about ten times more usage than before. So it looks like it’s working well so far… More soon on the rest of the changes.
Steve Herrmann is editor of the