Awhile back I mentioned a project that we had in the works. The curtain has been lifted, partially, with the "preview" launch at new.savannahnow.com of an all-new community website associated with the Savannah Morning News. In a matter of weeks, the site will be completed and will replace www.savannahnow.com.
It's been more than a year since we launched BlufftonToday.com, the website that flipped the conventional model on its head, focusing on community interaction that drives print content. With BT we demonstrated that community interaction could yield a larger and more loyal online audience than conventional "online newspaper" approaches.
This new project builds on that foundation, adding Myspace-like social networking features, online groups, a powerful new unified search system, neighborhood-level microzoning, and new tools for enhancing the news report with audio, video and other media assets.
The highly simplified homepage may give some newspaper traditionalists heartburn. News is inside. So is advertising. Up front: Four basic choices and a search engine. Dive in.
Comments
one bozo's reaction
Been eagerly awaiting it, Steve.
I couldn't agree more about the need to build sites around search, but that engine could use some serious sexing up -- I'm not going to navigate by search unless it runs _much_ faster, and I'm not going to bookmark a page unless I can use it to navigate.
That said, I think bookmarking one of the verticals would suit me fine; I'd simply neglect that front page. As long as there's _heavy_ cross-promotion among the verticals.
I don't much like selecting from a drop-down menu to search by vertical (why not radio buttons, to see my options, or some bigger buttons?), and I don't much like scrolling past the "result counts" before I get my hot hot search results. I hope there'll be future support for search operators like "share:" to search within the "share" section.
I freaking love the dominant-image design, the tabloid-style Flash rotation and (geeking it up here) the login pages. Matching bylines with user accounts is a nice touch. Eager to see how reputations play out.
I tried to leave the above
I tried to leave the above in the "what do you think?" area of the site itself, by the way, but it was broken.