Sagebrush redesign
March 11th, 2008 by Bryan
The Nevada Sagebrush, student newspaper at Nevada-Reno, has undergone a redesign using Wordpress as their content management system. Here’s what the site looked like last week:
All in all, definitely an improvement over the old design, cleaner and more professional looking.
Below the fold, some details of the changes they’ve made, from an e-mail from Chelsea Otakan and Megan Moyer.
- Homepage
Homepage content has been reorganized in order to make better use of “above the scroll” space. There are less lengthy excerpts and more lists, allowing the reader to scan through a greater amount of content in a smaller amount of space, as well as creating more space for multimedia.- Section pages
The section pages have been reorganized to minimize the length of excerpts, allowing the reader to more easily scan through stories.- New Rotator
The old Flash-based rotator has been replaced with a more interactive and customizable AJAX rotator which allows you to pause it by clicking on a section.- Submenus
Each section now has its own submenu, allowing readers to pinpoint the stories they want more quickly.- Multimedia
The Multimedia page has been completely revamped, displaying thumbnails for photo galleries, audio slideshows, and videos.- Breaking News
The Breaking News box has been moved to the top and emphasized with a darker, more visible background color.- Icons
Mini icons have been integrated into many aspects of the site, highlighting comments, subscriptions, and multimedia.
March 11th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
The next step is completely dumping the concept of news presented online in this format. We just got up to Washington Post level, next step is something newish but better than Indy.com (and not as ugly).