Nunatsiaq tweaks its website to give cleaner look, better performance
New look coincides with paper’s 50th anniversary
Nunatsiaq News readers might have noticed some changes to our website that took effect Wednesday. The changes make the site easier to read and improve the performance of its search functions, as well as its report on trending news. (Photo by Corey Larocque)
When you hit a certain age, you feel the need to try out a new look.
That’s one reason Nunatsiaq News treated its website to a bit of a facelift this year, as the paper celebrates its 50th anniversary.
Readers might have noticed a few changes that kicked in on Wednesday.
The news content and advertising remain the same, but some new features on the website are meant to make it easier to read and easier to navigate.
It’s a subtle change, but the tabs for news, politics, business, health, justice, and arts and culture stories are now colour-coded. The tabs will help readers follow the news that interests them.
A bigger change is the beefing up of the site’s five regional pages — Nunavut, Nunavik, Iqaluit, Arctic and Southern Canada.
Under each one of those regional headings, we’re posting news stories and photos in a way that gives each regional page the same look and feel as the main homepage.
Nunatsiaq News is lucky to have readers from all over the North, across Canada, and around the world.
We know they have varied interests.
The more robust regional sections will give readers the ability to bookmark their favourite regional page, making that page their regular entry point instead of landing on the homepage by default.
In this era when Facebook is blocking news from Canadian sites over its dispute with the federal government’s Online News Act, it’s becoming more important than ever for readers to bookmark their favourite, trusted news sites and visit them regularly.
We have also tweaked our search function. It looks the same, but has some new bells and whistles that make it perform better. They include weighted results, highlighted search terms and article excerpts along with the article headline.
Also, the counter on the trending section has been upgraded to give a better, more accurate sense of which stories people are reading.
We’ve found that readers like to know what’s trending so they’re aware of what their friends, neighbours and colleagues are talking about. It’s one little change that will help our readers stay in the know.
It looks nice but I find it less functional.
When I click one of the links for specific news like for Nunavut or Iqaluit I’m given the three articles that were already under that link plus two more. We used to get the full list of news for that category.