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When you visited The Almanac’s website today, you may have noticed that things look a little bit different. We have rolled out a new home page design, with the goal of making it easier for our audience to find and read our articles.
This change has been months in the making and was undertaken in direct response to feedback from readers about our previous page design.
Perhaps most obviously, you’ll now see far more articles when you open our website from a desktop computer. Depending on your screen size, you can now see up to eight stories at once, rather than the three or four that were generally visible on our previous page.
We achieved this by switching from a two-column to three-column layout, including a right-hand column that doesn’t include photos. The goal is for you to be able to quickly get a comprehensive sense of the most important news happening in your community.
The additional story spots will also give our editors space to highlight a greater variety of articles, including our popular food, real estate and entertainment content.
If you’re checking us out on a cellphone, the design likely looks more similar to what you’re used to seeing. That’s because most of the presentation issues we heard about from readers were in relation to our desktop design. On a cellphone, you’ll continue to be able to scroll through our stories in a single, mobile-friendly column.
The changes to our home page don’t stop with the top section. We’ve also added more content to the home page, so you don’t have to sort through other pages on our site to find recent stories.
Readers previously reported that news stories often scrolled off our home page too quickly, making it hard to find an article from a day or two ago. To address that, we’ve now added a “More Local News” section where you’ll find recent news coverage that is no longer at the top of the page.
We’ve also significantly expanded the space on our home page for our lifestyles coverage. There are now separate sections for food, arts & culture and real estate coverage, each with space for three articles. We’ve also given more prominence to The Six Fifty, which is our publication covering culture and events throughout Silicon Valley.
One entirely new feature is our “Did You Miss” section, which will highlight some of our best work. In addition to the day-to-day news coverage that keeps our reporters busy, we also make a point as an organization to carve out time for in-depth reporting projects. This new section will make it easier for readers to peruse these stories.
As with all of our work, we always want to hear feedback from readers. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the new home page, or suggest additional changes to our website, contact me at zmorgan@embarcaderomedia.org.
Zoe Morgan helps to lead audience engagement efforts for Embarcadero Media Foundation, The Almanac’s parent organization.
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