WILLITS, 6/21/18
Dear Reader,
The Mendocino Voice is still not even two years old, and in that time we’ve tried to cover the whole scope of news in Mendocino, always making an effort to improve. And one of the things that we’re very happy to be improving today is our website — we’ve launched a brand new one, with a shiny new homepage and article lay-out, new options for advertisers, easier navigation, and other features. We hope that this new software will improve our loading speed, especially for our readers on their phones, out on roads with bad service. We also think that it makes the site more easy to navigate, so you can find the news you’re looking for.
Launching a new site with a small staff and a shoe string budget is tough, so there will be some kinks and bugs to work out. Please excuse any tech problems you see over the next few days, they will be resolved soon. But beyond that, we want to hear from you — what do you like about site, what seems broken, and what could we still improve? Write to us at [email protected], or comment here or on Facebook. Also, we changed our masthead and logo. Do you like the new one? We want to hear.
Beyond ease of use and load speed, this new website is allowing us to roll out two other big features. First, it will allow us to fully integrate our newsletter with our site, so if you’re signed up expect to beginning getting a twice weekly news round-up soon. And if you’re not signed up please do so, you can in the sidebar to the right.
This new site is also optimized to allow our advertisers to showcase their ads without becoming cluttered for our readers. As a small newspaper we depend on ads to survive, but we also understand that advertising is just another way for local businesses to communicate with their neighbors. So if you are a business owner looking to get the word out please drop us a line at [email protected], we have lots of great options.
Over the last year and a half our old website caused us a lot of grief, and we think this new one is not only an improvement in itself, but a tool to help us focus on our reporting and improve across the board. So we’d like to thank Josh Bowers, our new web-developer, who has been instrumental in creating this new site for us. If you are looking for someone local to help you build a website, Josh is your man. We’d also like to thank LION Publishers, an association of locally focused, independently owned online publishers that we belong to. Without their help, advice and encouragement we probably would not have been able to make these changes.
Keep reading, and remember we always appreciate feedback.
Yours,
Adrian Fernandez Baumann
Managing Editor, The Mendocino Voice
Looks good! Hopefully its updated more frequently