Website thoughts (v. 1.0)

Building a great website takes a lot of time and thought, mostly around who we’re trying to reach and what we’re trying to accomplish. After all, form follows function.

I’m certainly open to a variety of approaches, including the ‘I have a dream’ approach. It’s great to get all the ideas on the table. But…

This is a time-consuming process and it was clear from the group Friday that we share a sense that the site is badly flawed TODAY, particularly Hartford.

Perhaps there are a few quick interim steps we can take to stop the bleeding while we give thoughtful attention to the longer term answer.

I suggest we:
1) Collapse all those topics under a single button ‘Search news by topic.’ Click it and you display the laundry list.
2) Collapse all the ‘to do’ items under a similar button, perhaps labeled ‘Interact with us’.
3) Collapse the awards & events under a single ‘Events & Awards’ button.
4) Jiggle the ad/news spacing to create a larger centerpiece for news and more ad spaces in the areas freed by removing the laundry lists.
5) Appoint a small committee to develop a new color palette.

Nobody is winning or losing anything here. It’s just a cleanup and doesn’t obligate/commit anybody to anything downstream. It would seem we could do all this in a week and put ourselves on more solid footing to have the larger conversation.

And, not to duck the original assignment, I envision a tasteful splash page with one dominant news story and only a couple of ‘premium’ ads. There’d be a tight navigation bar that invites visitors to move to a selection of home pages – news home, advertising home, events/awards home – each of which would be developed and managed by the appropriate staff within an overarching architecture and style system.
I look forward to working with everyone on this as we go forward.

-- Norm Bell
Editor, Hartford Business Journal