Rob Curley's latest redesign
Online pioneer Rob Curley -- who earned widespread praise and many awards while running the Lawrence Journal-World's Web site -- is at it again, making his first big splash at his new paper with a redesign.
Curley's site, NaplesNews.com (of The Naples Daily News), launched a new design earlier this month that has lots of classic Curley traits, including a large feature lead story image on the home page, SMS alerts for entertainment listings, stories you can read on your iPod and a section called "dot.cool"
Here is a brief overview of some of the changes, from Curley:
• No more registration to read stories: Yep, it's as simple as it sounds. If you want to read a story, you just click the link. No e-mail, no password, no telling us your mother's maiden name. Nothing. If you thought you hated that you had to register to read stories, please know we hated it even more. So now it's gone. At least until our corporate bosses realize what we've done. The only time you have to register now is to take full advantage of some of our cool new content, such as leaving your own restaurant review, getting cell phone updates or leaving your two cents at the bottom of one of our stories. Registration accounts on the previous site no longer work anywhere on the site. When we said we rebuilt this thing, we meant it. There are no remnants of the former naplesnews.com anywhere on here. If you would like to take advantage of our new features, you can sign up for a new account here.• Restaurant guide: Whether you're wanting to find a restaurant that serves sushi after midnight or has the best early-bird specials, naplesnews.com has built one of the most comprehensive local restaurant guides on the planet. We visited nearly every restaurant in Naples and found out about everything from specialty drinks to signature dishes to weekly events. It's way more than just an address and phone number, and you can get it all on your mobile phone or even your iPod.
• Calendar: Whether it's school events or sports schedules, community organizations, city council meetings or art exhibits, the ultimate look at what's going on in Collier County is on naplesnews.com. And the site can even send event reminders to your e-mail account or call your cell phone.
• Mobile phone/SMS alerts: Not only can you have our site call your cell phone to remind you of events from our calendar, we can also call you with all of the latest live information for the Florida Everblades hockey team.
• We: This new section of our site puts you in control. Your photos. Your stories. Your videos.
• New search engine: First off, we moved it to the top of every page. Then we made it so that it searched more than just stories. This baby searches the ads in our newspaper, our new events calendar, our photos, our videos, our restaurant guide and much more.
• Ads from the print edition: Did you hear that there was an awesome coupon in the Daily News for carpet cleaning, and you missed it? Now you can find it on our site.
• Read stories on iPods: Every story on our site has a link so that it can be downloaded to your iPod so that it can be read at a later time, like say your flight from Fort Myers to Chicago.
• Enhanced movie listings: Along with expanded showtimes for nearly every theater in Southwest Florida, you now also can get a short review and even watch trailers.
• Podcasts: We're not a radio station, but we play one online. Now you can listen to the Daily News on your drive to work.
• Blogs: They're like columns on steroids.
• Video and other multimedia: The Naples Daily News is one of the few newspapers in the nation with a full-time video staff. That means you can watch not only clips of local high school bands performing, but also listen to audio interviews with newsmakers or surf through tons of photo galleries.
And many more new features are coming, including a new mobile phone edition, a version of the site built specifically for the Sony PSP, daily wake-up calls from our site, and expanded sports coverage for local high schools and the Florida Everblades.
Jan 25, 2006 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(0)
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