Last night The Daily Anchor underwent a major redesign in order to add new features, enhance user experience, and scale the site to meet our growing needs. The bulk of the transformation is complete, but many more enhancements will be made in the coming days.
While we’ve got the hood open and are tinkering around, it’d be great to hear from you with any requests for new features, or just to hear your thoughts on the redesign, so shoot me a quick email and speak your mind.
We loved our original design, but it didn’t have the flexibility to grow with us or accommodate new features, and what kind of marketing blog would we be if our platform was based on yesterday’s technology?
There are more new features on the way, but here’s a glimpse at some of the enhancements we made last night:
- User Interface - Much simpler, more intuitive, and less distracting.
- Scalability - We moved to a much more robust platform that can easily grow with the site
- Widgetization – The Daily Anchor is now capable of easily accommodating widgets on the right and left hand columns, which has allowed us to:
- Move the video player higher up on the page
- Add polling functionality… Look to the right and you can vote on what you think of the redesign
- Improve our category list
- Add a popular posts component
- Add an archives component
- Add a recent comments widget (v 1.o is live now, v 2.0 will launch this week)
- Widget capability allows the site to adapt to new technologies as needed
- We optimized the site for advertising. The overall number of ad zones remains the same, but their placement is more refined and less intrusive.
- Comments RSS: Made it possible to subscribe to comments on a particular post via RSS
- Print capability: It’s now possible to view a print-friendly version of posts and pages
- And again, there’s more to come. Speak up; now is the time to make a feature request.
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The Daily Anchor Editorial Team.
Photo credit: Kaj Bjurman
