Our new site – now live in English
I was forced to launch the new version of our home page in English prematurely due to a human error (my error), but in the end that’s good. There are a number of things that weren’t ready just yet, so I’ll be updating this blog with details of the changes I’ve made today and in the next few days in line with things I know we need to fix, and suggestions that are coming in. Please keep those suggestions coming!
Here are some of the fixes done today:
- A link has been added at the bottom of the page to the old home page — this is primarily to allow us to identify things which are there, but aren’t yet on the new page.
- I’ve restored a link to our Working Women page.
- And to our Newswires page.
- I restored the ‘view more news from your country or region’ box to the bottom list of current news stories.
- I restored the ‘submit news’ link.
- And finally, I restored the link to our privacy page.
There’s a lot more to do (including making this work for all languages), so consider this a process and please be patient.
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Comment on the new design via Twitter:
maritimeunion Mar 11, 4:38pm via Twitter for Mac
@labourstart new site looking cool, clean lines, sharp styles, all good
Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have the script open the news stories in new tabs or windows and set the home page to refresh every so-many minutes? That way we would get higher times spent on our site and bring down the bounce rate.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we had something like this to input our stories to the database?
http://demo.shubhamtipstricks.com/extracturl/index.php
The code:
http://shubhamtipstricks.com/2052/facebook-like-extract-url-data-using-jquery-php-and-ajax/
Gave it a spin by pasting-in a URL but I’m not sure I see the advantage Andy. Can you explain?
Just to report in: have had a number of positive comments about the new design, but a few people have also said that they miss the search facilities.
I hesitate to say, but the positive feedback seems to suggest we should mebbe plan for more frequent re-designs. You ready to start work on the next one Eric? 🙂
Derek, apparently you missed my first comment, second in line after yours and my earlier comments on the earlier posts(everyone’s entitled to a vacation).
My point is that the new design may be prettier, and I agree it is, but it doesn’t actually do anything to get visitors to sign up to campaigns or to our newsletters, nor to help correspondants enter stories, functions which should be the main aims of a new design. Unfortunately, this is not the case, on the contrary, even basic aims like searching news from a country are likely to be less apparent in the confusion of the multiple columns.
We also need a platform that can stand up to time.
NISM?
I’m really really much more in favor of the “old” design. For whatever challenges it presented to users, and I am not convinced that there were any significant challenges, I just think all due respect that the new design is not at all better. Simple as that. Just don’t see the value in the different design. Especially the focusing on one item. It turns the front page into more of a newspaper / publication than I think is helpful, or appropriate. If there are behind the scenes changes that are worth doing that are of value for the administration of the site, all well and good. But beyond the fact that Ican’t see any advantage to the changed design, when I tried to look for a specific country, the country select tool was not working.
In essence, I think that the value in a consistent looking site is worth more than a change. Perhaps, just perhaps, some of the arrangement of the items on the left side of the “old page” could use changing, but I would approach this … gingerly.
Thank you to Arieh for your comments. The drop down menu for selecting a country has broken, but it was working when I first put it there a few days ago. I will have it fixed within 24 hours. Not sure how that happened.
As for the other comments, while of course they are appreciated, we did have a discussion in this space before the new site went live and a number of suggestions were made, nearly all of which were implemented. The feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive.
I realize that not everyone likes change, and I understand that, but the LabourStart site has long been due for a renewal and I see this as a continuing process. The current appearance will of course change over time, we will add and drop features according to our changing needs, and constructive criticism is always welcome.