There's not much to write about in this morning's Emerald City news, but there is one back-burner item worthy of note. Std-Ex editor Dave Greiling provided an informative Std-Ex column yesterday, which touches on two topics which have been discussed earlier on Weber County Forum, i.e., the Standard's newly redesigned website, and the upcoming September 15 municipal election primary:
• Adding the word Drupal to your vocabularyFirst, Mr. Greilling points out that the new website is the first full website makeover in five years (we guess we can assume a change was overdue); and he predicts that once Std-Ex readers get used to the new format, it will be "easier for site visitors to find the content they’re looking for." We spent several hours prowling the site yesterday; and it this point we believe Mr. Greiling is right. Whereas our main initial usability gripe had related to what seemed to be the poor indexing of online articles, we've now discovered that the indexing is actually improved. For those who haven't yet explored the website, look for this link in the front page upper left column: "Read more popular stories...". When you click this link you'll find a long list of story headlines which are available for quick and efficient browsing. And in truth, it's apparent that the Standard is increasing the volume of articles appearing on its website; and decreasing the number of them which remain hidden behind the paid Digital Edition firewall too.
Mr. Greiling also mentions the revamped article comments sections, and the beginning of a "voluntary" registration system, (which signals the end of "anonymous" comments on the Std-Ex site). We can well understand why the Standard decided to adopt this new system. Take it from us. From a webmaster's point of view, the task of monitoring the trolls and vandals is a royal pain; and we thus applaud the Std-Ex for taking this decisive step. While we'll predict that this system will result in a drop in reader comments, we believe there's also a bright side to this. We completed the simple registration process yesterday and were delighted to find that the the comments section module has been vastly improved, with word-processor-style text formatting functions and a whole potload of other new capabilities. Yeah, it's a tradeoff between privacy and greatly enhanced usability. On balance however, we're going to call the new comments system, and the site design itself... a Winner.
Mr. Greiling devotes the second half of his column to the Standard's decision to withhold the results of its forthcoming council candidate questionnare until September 10, a full ten days after early voting had commenced. He justifies the decision on the basis of the fact that a number of council candidates had missed the September 1 submission deadline; and here's our take on that: Serious candidates who were truly interested in providing information to the public would have made this a first priority. Apparently numerous of them didn't. If we'd been running the Standard-Examiner news room, we'd have told the late submitters "tough luck."
Unlike the Standard's new website, we'll label the decision to withhold important candidate information during the week of early voting as the bone-headed decision that it was... a Loser.
Of course that's just us. So what say our gentle readers about all this?
