Giving a boost to the web
By Staff
Jason Cannon
In the last 12 months or so, much work has gone into improving the products we place in front of our readers.
We launched a redesign of our newspaper in February. We totally revamped our shopper, Classifieds Plus in April.
The final piece of the puzzle was put into place Monday, with the redesign of our website, fct.wpengine.com.
The new website is the perfect compliment to our paper product, offering 24 hour, seven day a week coverage to our readers.
Our new site offers greater reader interactivity with features such as blogs and reader photo albums.
It's also much more convenient. Previously, readers who wanted to submit engagements, weddings and anniversary announcements had to stop by our office and fill out the form.
At best, we could fax it to them, but they still had to come by or mail us a photo.
Now, all those forms are available on the site. They can be filled out directly on the site and a photo can be attached electronically.
They will be sent directly to us via email.
Also, there's a reader comment portion at the end of each article.
Readers can comment on any column or article as long as it's on-topic and not profane or defamatory.
The guestbook feature, a popular portion of our old site, remains on the new one.
Readers have used the guestbook over the past several years to find lost classmates, old yearbooks and details about their ancestors.
This has become sort of a clearinghouse for reader-to-reader information.
Also, the website will be updated everyday, even on non-publication days to provide readers with fresh content seven days per week.
My favorite part is our new e-alert feature. Readers are now able to subscribe to our mailing list. Anytime there is a breaking news event, we can get that out in only a matter of minutes.
This is something offered by the big boys – CNN, Google News and others. I absolutely love this feature.
If something major is going down at noon, you should know about it five minutes later with the e-alert. I hope you will take advantage of it.
The website in no way replaces our newspaper, it only compliments it.
Our website allows us to offer an additional four publication days to better service our reading audience.
Many of our regular newspaper readers also check our website to get news updates on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays – days when we don't publish a newspaper.
The Franklin County Times and fct.wpengine.com is a one-two punch when it comes to covering your local news and events and we're pleased to offer these improved services to our readers.
