Welcome to a New NewWest.Net

By Courtney Lowery, 5-19-08

The redesign, led by our creative director Marshall Hibbard and our intrepid development team, Chris Lombardi and Emily Witcher, incorporates a few new ventures and overall, gives our homepage a fresh new look.

The first thing you’ll notice is the new design at the top of the page. The New West Wire is a quickly changing feed of the most recent stories posted on NewWest.Net and all of our city, topic and blog pages. The spotlight section, immediately to its right, gives weight and space to our best, most important or most interesting pieces of the moment.  Below those, you’ll see a list of “New West Features”—the big reporting and commentary pieces from NewWest.Net.

Next, at the top right of the new front page, you’ll see a news and blog aggregator that pulls in headlines from news organizations and blogs across the Rockies.  And, it’s customizable: you’ll be able to hand-pick which sources and feeds you want to see your NewWest.Net homepage. (Click here to see how it works). The idea, with the aggregator and many of our blog posts (see below), is that we not only want to give you original reporting and commentary from NewWest.Net, we also want to make sure you’re tuned into the important work going on at other news organizations in the region.

As I mentioned earlier, another new feature is the New West Blog, full of bite-sized news, analysis and commentary. We’ve always had blogs on our site, as you know, but this is a dedicated place for that kind of conversational, connect-the-dots kind of writing, linking and sharing produced by a group of NewWest.Net staff writers and contributors, each of them tracking topics like energy, agriculture, the environment, travel & outdoors, literature and of course, the big story of growth and change in the Rockies.

Another thing you might notice is the prominent display of the New West Community Blogs. The Community Blogs are written by people across the region who run their own pages on NewWest.Net, where they write about where they live, what they do and overall what kind of New West they’re seeing from their vantage point.

And finally, we’ve upped the ante for those of you who participate in comment threads, our new forums feature or the “Unfiltered” section. On the right-hand side of the page is what used to be the “most commented” box. Now, you can tab into each section and see which stories have the most comments (as well as the latest word from one of our commenters), the most recent forums post from MissoulaForums.Com (and soon from other forums in one of our cities or on one of our core topics) or the most recent Unfiltered story.

Of course, there are other small changes too—ones you’ll notice right away, including the placement of the page in the center of your screen, more space, more organized navigation and a new place for the search NewWest.Net bar.

I’d love to hear what you think and am ready for questions and suggestions, so drop me a line with your thoughts at courtney@newwest.net. Also, please let us know if you have any problems viewing the site or spot any bugs we may have missed. We’re big on the collaborative process around here so the extra eyes are always appreciated.

And thanks for reading!

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