Daily obits
We’ve had a few calls and messages about the obituary page – a popular destination on our site. You can get to our obits from the sub-navigation on the home page. Just click the link that says “Obituaries.” The link is also available from the sub-navigation on the News page with the text “Obits/Public Notices.”
Once you are there, you can browse our database of Guest Books with the search menu at the top of the page. You can scroll down a little further to see the links to the daily listings that appear in the newspaper.
Photo slideshows
We added our page for photo slideshows to the main navigation of our multimedia page. We have a lot of awesome slideshows from our photography department. Now, you can see them again on our new site.
You will see a completely revamped multimedia page in the coming weeks. It was showcase our videos, photo galleries, slideshows, podcasts and more. Creative director Scott Horton can’t wait to get that page going. In the meantime, we have a page that still shows all that stuff – just not as pretty as we’d eventually like it.
Blog page
We’ve heard from people wondering where our main page for the blogs have gone. We are working on that. We knew we were launching without that page; the design for that page is still being finalized. However, each of our active blogs is still available through the various sections of the site that they relate to – and most can be found through our Voices page.
We get lots of of traffic on our blogs. Traffic for our blogs has tripled in the past few months, but we haven’t seen a great increase on the main blogs page. Our conclusion: people are getting to our blogs from many different areas of the Web, but not necessarily the main blogs page, so we made it a secondary priority for launch.
We will get that page up soon. Stay tuned.
Take a site tour
The site tour is is now operational. See a video tutorial for the site, and watch a video of creative director Scott Horton explaining the philosophy behind the design.
We are seeing things we need to tweak and find a home for. Your feedback from various posts, e-mails and phone calls are already helping. We will systematically address issues beginning now.
NewsOK heroes
Let me take a quick time out to point out the heroes of NewsOK.com.
The process of the online redesign began more than a year ago. And until the past few months, we’ve discussed Then, Scott Horton, the creative director in the Audience Development department at OPUBCO Communications Group, led a team to conceptualize the new Web site. He’s been working with Marilyn Hoeffner, our site manager and Andy Fugate, new media director, to build the infrastructure and develop the new technologies to power the site.
I’ve been working with NewsOK.com since 2000 – before NewsOK.com even existed (we were connectok.com and oklahoman.com). I’ve been through many redesigns and been a part of many discussions about our product as it has morphed and grown through the years. I’ve always felt lucky to be a part of a group of people that cared so deeply about the product they spent their days and night working on. And I’ve always told outsiders that the amount of talent on the art, design and programming teams is astounding (that’s Scott, Andy and Marilyn).
I’m a journalist by trade. So watching those types of minds from close range is like seeing a circus act … you know … you’re not sure how they do that, and you don’t want to stare — but it’s hard to look away.
New NewsOK.com site launches
NewsOK.com has a drastic new look.
It’s among many changes and redesigns we’ve had at OPUBCO Communications Group in the past few weeks.
- We unveiled a new Oklahoman newspaper to our readers on Monday.
- We’re unveiling a new LOOKatOKC to our readers free a hundreds of locations throughout the metro today.
- We’re going to unveil a new look to OKC N Style tomorrow morning in the newspaper and on several free racks in the Oklahoma City.
And now comes the one that affects our online audience – NewsOK.com.
It launches today, but that’s not the end of our work — it’s just the beginning. We will be adding new content, tweaking existing content and enhancing all areas of the new Web site over the course of the next few weeks.
We’re proud of this new site, and we think it’s something our users (more than 1.3 million unique users per month) will find improved over the previous look.
But our pride doesn’t mean we’re flawless — Not by any means. We look at this site as a partnership between us at NewsOK and you, the user. We can fix on the fly, we can adjust in an hour, and we can re-think in day.
You can help us with that process.
We will have an interactive site that allows you to take a tour and leave your feedback easily. In the meantime, simply leave a comment on this blog or e-mail webmaster@newsok.com. If you really want to speak to a person, you can – just call (405) 475-3050 between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m.
I’ll report back in the coming hours, days and weeks on the content we are enhancing, the functionality we are adding and the problems we are addressing.
But I won’t post again until Thursday morning — we have to sleep sometime.
