Changing Again: A Note To Our Readers

by Contributor | June 27, 2008 3:58 pm

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
–Andy Warhol

And so it is that we make some more changes around here. After all, they weren’t gonna change themselves.

Friday evening, we’ll change the look of of the website. It will result in a more streamlined look and feel, a simpler way of seeing the news in its various categories. The reason for that change is simple: I don’t like the look of things at the moment. And I’ve got only myself to blame. It’s the design I came up with, and which our long-suffering webmaster, Matt Cwalinski, turned into functional code.

It’s also not a simple design for our tiny, overworked staff to maintain — we have to shift lots of pieces around to make things work right.

It shouldn’t be that hard, and after tonight (the gods of code willing), it won’t be.

And most of our ads will be larger, and of a national standard size. Our surveys over the years tell us many of you feel the commercial information is important and helps you make buying decisions. We want those ads to have more impact.

The other change is a little more significant. We’re unifying the two Daily News websites under a common banner.

For a while now, the main part of our URL has been https://oswegocountytoday.com. If you typed in fultondailynews.com, you got the Fulton home page, and likewise for Oswego. We had hoped that our wonderful publishing software would allow us to keep doing what we’ve done all these years — hide the publishing system on one domain (in this case, oswegocountytoday.com) and serve up pages that look like two separate domains (the fultondailynews and oswegodailynews sites).

Alas, it won’t.

We can keep fighting it, or we can give in. We’re giving in. Oswego County Today, it is. Our masthead, when we get it ready, will incorporate our names of the last nine and eight years. But we’ll be a single site from here on out, with very little geographic separation.

We’ll also be fixing some of the nagging little stuff we’ve lived with since our last big changeover, such as massively long URLs to stories.

That means that when you next check in on us, your bookmarks may take you to different places, or to the dreaded 404 error screen. We’re working to make sure that old URLs work properly.

But we won’t be losing any of the stories in this system — they’ll be converted to the new look and URL.

We will be shutting down the site somewhere between 5 and 6 Friday night to get things done. With any luck, it’ll take about an hour. With no luck, longer.

As always, let us know how you feel about this stuff.

The more things change, the more they remain… insane.
—Michael Fry and T. Lewis, Over the Hedge

[Note: The software change somehow turned off comments for this post, which is ironic if you think about it. I’ve turned them on again. NOW, you can let us know what you like and don’t like. – Dave]

Source URL: https://oswegocountytoday.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/editors-desk/changing-again-a-note-to-our-readers/

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