Sentinel.com blog

You may have noticed things look a little different at www.santacruzsentinel.com. That’s because we’ve decided to start the new year right, by going through and doing some housekeeping on our home page (Thanks, Christina Gullickson!). Here are some highlights of how our site is different in 2013:

1. Bigger headers, with RSS feeds and links to cleaned-up section pages.
2. New section feeds including Food and Wine, and Home and Garden. Our features department regularly produces helpful and informative pieces that now will be more prominently displayed. Because these are weekly sections, they will be boosted from the bottom of the page to higher up when they publish.
3. We removed some of the clutter. Many of the items that were creating the NASCAR effect on our home page have either been cleaned up or removed (where possible) for a better viewing and reading experience.

Coming soon: Updates to our social media feeds on every page. We’re going to update and improve our events calendar. Redesign of the entire site, courtesy of Digital First Media, is also in the works.

Suggestions? There are some things we just can’t change due to advertising obligations or our content management system setup (also scheduled to be updated this year), but if you have an idea, it’s possible we can make it happen. Let us know!

PS – We’re also working on a repository of the vast “Weird” news from Santa Cruz – follow @weirdsantacruz on twitter, like us on Facebook and visit the Weird page.

We’ve made a handful changes to the Sentinel home page this week.

We’ve added a breaking news twitter widget to a fairly prominent position on the right side of the page. We’re encouraging all reporters and editors to break news first on twitter, and to send photos, video and audio links through twitter from the scene of breaking news.

To make a little room for our widget, we’ve reduced the number of stories at the top of the home page. We think this will also make it easier for readers to find the best of our coverage. For more local coverage, including all the stories in today’s news section, see our local news page.

Among other projects, we’re working to build a list of Santa Cruz area bloggers on a wide variety of subjects. We will link out and highlight the best content, no strings attached. Submit your blog or website to the list here.

You may know that MediaNews, the Sentinel’s parent company, is now run by Digital First. This is good news for the website. One of the first moves will be to add a little staff to the online department here at the Sentinel (although everyone on staff contributes in many ways to what appears online). Christina Gullickson will be doubling the size of the Online Team, beginning in January.

For more on what’s ahead and what Digital First means for MediaNews, the Sentinel and as a concept, see this week’s blog posts from Steve Buttry.

• How a Digital First approach guides a journalist’s work
• Digital First journalists: What we value
• 10 ways to think like a Digital First journalist

Posted from Santa Cruz, California, United States.