Brandon's thoughts

I found the web site workshop very informative and I think it’s great that we’re all actively thinking about the web site and how to improve it.

Here’s a bullet-point list of what I think should be important features on our home page:

-Prominent brand logo of WBJournal, MaineBiz and HBJ
-A search tool that provides effective search results.
-Breaking/Daily news items. This is for visitors who come to our site wanting to know what the latest and most important news is.
-Feature stories from the print edition. This is for recurring visitors to our web site who are there to peruse what content we have to offer.
-Poll/Reader survey to engage readers
-Simple, broad tabs with drop-down menus

This means that some things would not be included as they currently are on the web site.
These include the sign in box and the browse by keyword box. Removing these would open up our web site to expand the portions that we really do want to highlight.

Two other suggestions I have:
-Keep it simple. I think the best web sites that we looked at in the workshop were simple, easy layouts that don’t waste space or words.

-Provide flexibility. This may be a wish-list item, but I think it would be great to have flexibility in what we have as the main focus of our web site. For example, if we have great photos one issue, we should highlight those and have our web site feature them. (I’m thinking of the dairy story with photos and the women in business profiles).
On that same note, if we have a big breaking news story, we should let people know that it’s a big story, and put a breaking news tab on it.
When we don’t have breaking news or strong photos, we should use the print features that we already have and highlight those.
Depending on the day, the news cycle and the content, we would have some days when our web site would prominently feature breaking news, other days when it would feature photos and other days when it would be print features.
Right now our page is always the same, daily news items and print features below. I know we don’t have all the resources in the world, but I think it would be great if we could switch those up depending on what our strongest/most important content is.
We can do this while having those main elements I outlined earlier and a simple, sleek layout.