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Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.

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19 November 2013

We've made a few changes to our front page today, as you may have noticed. They do a better job of presenting our content so you don't miss anything important.

The main issue we wanted to address was the same one our news ticker addressed. With a totem pole of headlines, it's hard to separate the news items from the features. They all look the same.

We thought of using different colored banners to distinguish news from certain features, say, but the color combinations we tried just didn't work. Simple has always been better.

One of these days we'll tell you what a blessing it has been to be our own coder and designer. Those are two positions every business needs more than it realizes.

The trouble with the news ticker is that you have to wait for it. Waiting for headlines didn't cut it for us. And if you happened to search for a term in the ticker list, you got a mysterious ghost hit on the page courtesy of jQuery.

We don't dislike the totem pole approach for a publication that generates no more than a handful of stories a day. You can, if you visit daily, see what's going on at a glance.

And if you only come by every month, the Archive works well, grouping stories into departments. But the archive, which is on another page, only gets updated at the end of the month. And who wants to wait?

We thought about a Verve-style panel approach but it wasn't the right fit for this site. We wouldn't highlight enough stories to fill the layout.

Instead we came up with our left-hand column of links, which was inspired by a few online news sources we like that use columns to lay out the stories for various departments.

We expect we'll have to pruned those links on the front page. But we'll let them run on in the yearly indices like 2013. And, thanks to a reader suggestion, we've set up a page to collect each category.

That approach lets us dispense with the insert between today's and yesterday's stories that was devoted to our text search box and our feed links. We just added them to the bottom of the column.

And at the top, we put the day and date. Something we often want to know ourselves <g>.

We did the whole thing waiting for a delayed arrival at SFO.

One of these days we'll tell you what a blessing it has been to be our own coder and designer. Those are two positions every business needs more than it realizes.

But that's not the business we're in. We're here to enhance your enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. So we're getting back to the grindstone right now....


Comments

So I like the bar along the left with the different types, however it'd be great if you could make the section title and turn it into a page with all of those post types grouped together. That way I can easily see all the Matinees (awesome BTW!) and scroll through and find the ones I haven't had the chance to watch yet.

-- Aaron

Good idea! The list got a little long on the 2013 full index and separate pages would solve that problem, too.

We've added the pages with a "More" link at the end of each section. Thanks!

-- Mike


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